"More than 700 million email addresses and a number of passwords have been leaked in what could be the biggest spambot dump ever seen.…

Users of affected accounts are advised to change their passwords as soon as possible to avoid being further compromised. …"

The site below explains more, and has a link that reports whether or not you've been PWNED:

www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetec...leaked-spammers.html

<PWNED: A variation of the word "owned". The only reason that this word came about was because of a typo, and given that P and O are right next to each other. It has nothing to do with combining words or anything of the sort. It is rumored to have come about from an early Warcraft3 map, in which the creator meant to have a trigger say "PlayerX got ownd", trying to use the "1337speak" variation of "owned", but hit P instead of O, thus giving birth to "pwnd".>

If some perp has only your username, I don't see that as a problem. But if they have your PW too, then they could log in to your email account, change the PW, locking you out of your account. Unfortunately, the site doesn't reveal whether or not they have both.

I don't trust such benevolence and am not chancing someone harvesting "live" email addresses by entering any of mine in their "search" engine.

I get enough spam.

This^^^^^!!!!

I'm not punching my info into the address collecting software.

Please click on this -->Link to check if your BankEmail account has been compromised.

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Suckers

The site asks only for your email address, not your email account PW. Email addresses, sans PW, can scarcely be considered confidential information. Perps can easily get them by the boatload. But I have a PW vault that generates long, strong PWs – a different PW for every account.

One benefit of the site is that it reports where your credentials were obtained from. In my case, it was a "DailyMotion" data breech. I was glad to know that, because I'd never reveal any significant info to such a site. But if my email address had come from a PayPal data breech, I'd've taken immediate action.

My email server, Fastmail.com, has a superb spam filter. And I haven't seen any increase in spam. In fact, I've had no spam at all since using the checker.

Here's an article about the site:

http://www.davidleonard.london...been-pwned/?pdf=9090

In the past Para has asked that these types of threads not be started. Anything that asks a member to type in their email address to get info is a no-go.

I recieved the e-mail yesterday. This sight came to the forefront during the ashley madison scandle a year or so ago. Since then it has alerted me to 2 data breaches, which have allowed me to change the associated passwords. In both cases it was not till a month later that the websites notified me.

quote:

Originally posted by DSgrouse:
I recieved the e-mail yesterday. This sight came to the forefront during the ashley madison scandle a year or so ago. Since then it has alerted me to 2 data breaches, which have allowed me to change the associated passwords. In both cases it was not till a month later that the websites notified me.

Thanks for the feedback. I requested email notifications of website breeches exposing my credentials yesterday. That'll save the necessity of periodic checks, and will provide more timely warnings. The email notification sign-up process has a prove-that-you're-not-a-robot procedure that's a bit tricky. I had to try a second time.