Patrick Domingues

So, your clicking around on the internet and come across news of compromised companies and now your wondering have I been compromised online? Are my usernames and passwords available online? Unfortunately, the answer to your question is your information is probably in the dark web up for grabs for anyone to take.

Data breaches have become quite common and there isn’t anything you can do about other companies security and how they practice their cyber security protections. It is astonishing how many websites are hacked every day, if your registered on any given website your taking a gamble.

Web Hosting/Website Statistics and Facts 2019 from hostingfacts.com 

• As at December 2018, there are approximately 1.94 billion websites in the world.
• The world’s first website was published on August 6, 1991 by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee.
• 8 percent of all Internet traffic comes from bots, while only 48.2 percent of internet traffic comes from humans.
• Google is the world’s most visited website, followed by Youtube and Facebook. Chinese search engine Baidu is the world’s fourth most visited website.
• With a 59.7 percent market share and about 22.6 million active sites, WordPress is the world’s number one CMS. It hosts sites like The New York Times, Forbes and even the Facebook Blog.
• Over 90,000 websites are hacked every day.
• WordPress is the most hacked CMS — with 83 percent of hacked websites using the WordPress platform.

How to find out if your compromised.

So now you’re at a point where you happen to be really concerned and you want to know if you have been compromised online or not and so first you will have to check on a website called haveibeenpwned.com .

The primary landing page of this website will request you to put in your email. So first to find out if your email is available in the dark web is to type in that email of yours. It will tell you if you have been PWNED in red. No need to panic just yet we do not know if your password is compromised or not.

The second section you should look at is the Pwn Passwords lookup feature. Good practice here would be to type in all the passwords you ever used and if the website states you have been PWNED in red it would be a good idea to change your passwords even if it’s not for the corresponding email address you typed previously. 

There is not much you can do to protect yourself from other companies mishaps. But you can keep information and maintain good security practices with your email, generate strong passwords and review cybersecurity training options even if it’s videos from YouTube.

Patrick Domingues

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