These days you keep hearing about the new of one or other data breaches involving some of the very popular and large online services like Yahoo Mail or Facebook. These data breaches often affect millions of people all over the world as their email addresses and other personal identifiable information (such as real name, street name) gets into the hands of the attackers. Your only defense is to change the password and other security related information as soon as you hear about such data breaches for an online service.
But how would you find out if your email address or username is involved in the latest data breach incident? Earlier Mozilla started a service called Firefox Monitor that helps you find out about such information. And now the developers of the popular anti-spyware Spybot Search & Destroy have released a tool called Spybot Identity Monitor that can tell you whether your username and email address were part of the various recent publicly known data breaches.
After the installation, you can launch Identity Monitor and click on the Accounts button to add your email addresses and usernames that you want it to monitor for you. You can add as many of the usernames or email addresses as you want. As soon as you have added a new username or email address, it will quickly tell you the number of data breaches that contain those usernames or email addresses.
In my case, my email address has been involved in six different data breaches according to Spybot Identity Monitor. It won’t give you details about which data breaches it has detected to contain your email address, but if you click on the Services button, you will find the list of all the online services along with the data breach reporting date, the domain name of the service, the number of accounts affected etc.
If you click on the big blue circle and then on Take Action, it also tells you what to do if it shows you that your email address was involved in one or more data breaches. Basically, you simply have to change the password of your email address and if you it is possible, enable the two-factor authentication for it. It would be really helpful, if it also had a strong password generator tool to help people find a very strong password for their email addresses, but you can use our tool PassGen or use one of the best online password generators.
Spybot Identity Monitor can help you keep your email address and other online accounts safe by telling you if it was part of any of the hundreds of data breaches in the past many years. Everyone should keep it installed on their system so that you can quickly change the passwords and stay unaffected of these security breaches.
You can download Spybot Identity Monitor from https://www.safer-networking.org/products/spybot-identity-monitor/.