Have You Been Pwned?

Yes, “pwned” is spelled correctly. According to the Urban Dictionary, the word “pwned” is:

A corruption of the word “Owned.” This originated in an online game called Warcraft, where a map designer misspelled “owned.” When the computer beat a player, it was supposed to say, so-and-so “has been owned.” Instead, it said, so-and-so “has been pwned”.

Rivera, Daniel. Urban Dictionary. Retrieved August 3, 2018

Has your email account or password ever been compromised? Do you even know?

You have personal computers, smart phones, social network accounts, and family members with the same, maybe even more than you. All of these devices and accounts are up for grabs if you don’t protect yourself and your loved ones. You are probably at greater risk of having your personal systems compromised than your company’s. You are vulnerable. Your account may have already been compromised. In today's parlance, having your account compromised is called getting pwned. Why don’t you check to see if you’ve been pwned?

You can check whether you’ve been pwned and have an account that has been compromised in a data breach at https://haveibeenpwned.com/. At the time of this writing, Have I Been Pwned has details on 297 pwned websites, 5,369,804,192 pwned accounts, 75,653 pastes, and 82,644,754 paste accounts.

Let's explain pastes. According to the Have I Been Pwned FAQs:

Often when online services are compromised, the first signs of it appear on “paste” sites like Pastebin. Attackers frequently publish either samples or complete dumps of compromised data on these services.

A word to the wise—when you check if you have pwned accounts, try not to have anyone looking over your shoulder unless you are absolutely certain you won’t be embarrassed by the search results. The website displays a list of every breach where your email has been compromised.