Let’s Hope You’re Not On The PwnedList
If you’re ever in the mood to find out if your email account’s user name or password have been compromised by a hacker—and if you’re brave enough to want to know the truth—consider giving PwnedList.com a try. The website offers a tool that allows people to check if some of their online data has been compromised.
The website began as an experiment to see how many compromised email accounts could be harvested programmatically, according to the tool’s creators. In less than two hours, approximately 30,000 accounts (usernames and passwords) were collected, showing just how vulnerable some people’s Internet security was.
PwnedList does not hack into people’s accounts to collect their data! It extracts usernames and emails from account dumps and stores the usernames and passwords in an encrypted form to prevent them from being re-hacked.
“The purpose of this project is to hopefully to raise security awareness, encourage users to be more proactive about handling their personal security in cyberspace and at the same time help people monitor their accounts for potential compromises,” says the PwnedList website.
One way to understand how PwnedList works is by thinking of it as a volunteer who searches the Internet, both manually and using complex programs, for information dumps. When PwnedList finds dumps of usernames and passwords, it encrypts them then adds them to its database. At the time this article was written, PwnedList bragged 4981012 discovered usernames and emails.
As cool as PwnedList is, it’s important to remember that it’s by no means an alternative to safe Internet security practices. The easiest of these is changing your passwords regularly and making them long and difficult. PwnedList is merely a way to casually check if any of your accounts’ information has been collected by a hacker somewhere.
The limitation of the tool, though, is that it references your information against the data it has collected over time. In other words, your information may very well have been hacked or compromised but not collected by PwnedList. If that’s the case, relying on PwnedList as a litmus test can be misleading.
Overall, PwnedList is a cool tool that offers an interesting, albeit limited, service. Give it a try. And don’t get too excited if your results come back positive—that means you’ve been hacked!
About RESCUECOM:
RESCUECOM provides computer repair and computer support, 24/7: Meeting every tech support need including data recovery, virus removal, networking, wireless services, and computer support for all brands of hardware and software. For computer support or information on products, services, or computer repair, visit https://www.rescuecom.com or call 1-800-RESCUE-PC.
For More Information, Contact:
David Milman, CEO
315-882-1100
david@rescuecom.com
Filed under: Internet Security, rescuecom, tips