For the past few years, we have been hearing about data breaches at various tech giants. What does it mean for you? If you are using the services of those tech giants, it means some or all of the following data might be at risk.
Names, dates of birth, email addresses, employers, genders, geographic locations, IP addresses, job titles, phone numbers, physical addresses, social media profile data
You might receive ransom emails about your data too. Just don’t panic. Breaches are bad for companies as well as users. But you know what information is available at the tech giants’ disposal — that data is already public, shared by you for your network, and can anyway end up in a telecaller’s database. So don’t panic; instead, focus on what damage can actually happen to you.
So how do you check if your email address has been compromised?
Just head to haveibeenpwned.com, enter your email address, and it will check your data against the database of recent breaches. For example, my office email was leaked in LinkedIn’s breach. I know what data I published on LinkedIn, so nothing to panic about — all I have is some spam routing to my mailbox every other day. The only things to do are change your password, enable two-factor authentication, and ignore all spam emails.
Happy Internet Life to you 🙂