Check This Database to See If Your Email Credentials Have Been Stolen
Data breaches are an unfortunate reality of the digital age. Chances are, some companies you trust with your data will be hacked, and sensitive information stored on their servers will leak. If you spend a lot of time online, that means a significant portion of your data is floating around the internet.
While there’s no single centralized database for all stolen online credentials, one researcher has compiled a fairly large database that you can check to see if your email address is affected.
183 million email addresses
Cybersecurity researcher Synthient has compiled a massive database of stolen credentials from various online sources, totaling 3.5 terabytes ( 3,584 gigabytes). The vast majority of this data—91%—had already been discovered by other researchers. But because the database is so vast, 9% of the new data represents a large trove of credentials we haven’t encountered before.
The database itself contains 183 million unique email addresses, along with the websites they were linked to and the passwords used to log in. According to security researcher and blogger Troy Hunt , 9% of this number represents 16.47 million credentials that have never been previously exposed in a data breach. Hunt reached out to several of his subscribers to see if they could find their credentials in the database. One subscriber confirmed that the database contained a password he had previously used for his Gmail account, while another confirmed that the database contained websites he frequently visited.
There’s currently no reason to believe the database is inauthentic. These 183 million email addresses, along with associated websites and passwords, are simply floating around the internet, with over 16 million of them previously unknown. Your address could be among them.
How to check if your credentials are in this database
The entire database of 183 million email addresses has been uploaded to the website Have I Been Pwned . The site catalogs websites that have suffered data breaches, as well as the accounts affected. All you need to do is enter your email address in the appropriate field, and Have I Been Pwned will check it against its database for involvement in known breaches.
So, if your email address is in this latest database, it will appear here. It looks like none of my personal email addresses were in this database, but they have been mentioned in numerous other leaks.