Have you been pawned? Is this a legitimate site?
I tried the web site with 3 emails I use and several passwords I've used in the past. Some were identified as pawned. Others, the site said, were safe. My concern, is this just a way to collect more emails and passwords? I felt relatively assured as this article was published by Business Insider. Looking to see what the DU collective consciousness thinks.
Nearly 773 million email accounts have been exposed in a massive data breach. Here's how to check if you were affected
A massive database containing 772,904,991 unique email addresses and more than 21 million unique passwords were recently posted to an online hacking forum, according to Wired.
The hack was first reported by Troy Hunt of the hack security site Have I Been Pwned, which lets you check whether your email and passwords have been compromised and which sites your information was leaked from.
The data collection as a whole, called "Collection #1," doesn't appear to originate from a certain source, but is rather an aggregation of 2,000 leaked databases that include passwords that have been cracked, according to Wired. That's to say the protective layer that scrambles, or "hashes," a password to prevent your original password from being visible has been cracked, and the passwords are presented in a usable form on hacking forums.
Data in Collection #1 wasn't put up for sale, like many data leaks are. It was first hosted on popular cloud hosting site Mega before being taken down, then posted on a public hacking site.
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How to check if you've been affected
To check whether or not your data was affected, you can head over to HaveIBeenPwned.com and enter your email address. Once you hit enter, and if your data was affected, you can scroll down and see whether your data was included in the "Collection #1" leak.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/nearly-773-million-email-accounts-have-been-exposed-in-a-massive-data-breach-heres-how-to-check-if-you-were-affected/ar-BBSnsJ7?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=U452DHP
Business Insider
(Business Insider was launched in 2007 and is based in New York City. Founded by DoubleClick's former CEO Kevin P. Ryan, Dwight Merriman, and Henry Blodget,[6] the publication is a brand of Silicon Alley Insider (began May 16, 2007) and Clusterstock (started March 20, 2008).[7] In addition to providing and analyzing business news, the site aggregates news stories on various subjects from around the web. It reported a profit for the first time ever in the 4th quarter of 2010.[8] In June 2012, it had 5.4 million unique visitors.[9] In 2015 Axel Springer SE acquired 88% of the stake in Business Insider Inc. for $343 million (306 million).[10])
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider