With how much our lives have moved online, data breaches are one of the most significant threats to our personal information and create the potential for identity theft. Thankfully, you can check for free whether your information has been compromised by using pCloud’s Free Data Breach Checker. For a limited time, you can also get 75% off pCloud Pass password manager .
They say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the same applies to our digital lives. A data breach of any one website or service can have a ripple effect that puts your information broadly at risk. To be precise, a data breach is when a malicious hacker is able to access information that is supposed to be private – things like names, usernames, email addresses, and sometimes even passwords.
Even some of the services we depend on the most to be secure have fallen victim to exposing data. For example, back in 2017, over 145 million Americans had their information stolen from the credit bureau Equifax. More recently, T-Mobile has announced two separate instances of attackers obtaining information about the mobile carrier’s customers.
Thankfully, there are also groups working to create tools to protect people from this information being used against them. One such tool is the Free Data Breach Checker from pCloud Pass. As the name suggests, the checker securely verifies whether your private, personal information has ever been exposed online.
Simply enter your email address – pCloud will not save this address or send you any emails – and you’ll be shown full details on the (potentially many) times that information connected to your email address has been exposed. This includes full details of the website/service that leaked the data, approximately when it was taken, and what specifically was taken – date of birth, hashed passwords, name, email address, etc.
Using what you’ve learned from the Free Data Breach Checker from pCloud Pass, you can take meaningful action before an attacker gets access to your digital life. For example, if your password has been exposed, you should be sure to change that password on that site – and anywhere else you use it. Or, if something more sensitive has been exposed, such as your Social Security number or other financial information, you’ll likely want to contact your bank and/or credit union to decide on the best course of action.
You can think about using this Free Data Breach Checker in the same way as checking your credit report. If you check in periodically, you can act quickly to minimize the potential disruption to your life.
Of course, this tool is just one piece of keeping your digital life secure. You’ll also want to avoid reusing passwords whenever possible. It’s also a good idea to enable two-factor authentication, preferably through your email address or an authenticator app – not your phone number.
Rather than commit numerous unique passwords to memory, you can use a password manager like pCloud Pass, which can generate randomized passwords, save your login info (which is encrypted and secure), and sync it between devices.
- Get 75% off pCloud Pass password manager for a limited time.
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