Reminder: Check If Your Email Address Has Been Stolen Or Hacked [1]

With so much publicity surrounding last week's major ransomware outbreak, which spread to more than 150 countries, here's a timely reminder of something that you can do to check whether your details have been stolen by hackers.

When hackers steal your account details from a third-party system, they call it Pwning. It's pronounced Poning, and is hacker-speak for owning someone's details. No, I have no idea why either. But it does explain the reasoning behind an excellent online resource called Have I Been Pwned. You'll find it at www.haveibeenpwned.com [3] and it's basically a searchable database of stolen email addresses that have been acquired by hackers and then posted on the internet.

The database currently comprises 3.7 billion entries, from almost 50,000 different hacks. To use it, just go to the site and type in your email address. The site will tell you if your details have been leaked. If they have, you'll need to change your passwords.

You can also subscribe to the service if you want, which will then automatically alert you if your details subsequently appear in the database.