Check if your logins are secure

We use daily logins (username + password) to access emails, social media, streaming services and a sea of ​​other places online. If an unauthorized person gets hold of one of our logins, it is often attempted to be abused in one way or another.

We often recycle logins, so we don't have to remember a lot of different usernames and passwords. It is nice, but also quite risky, because if an unauthorized person gets a login we use several places, the risk of getting an account hacked is correspondingly greater.

8 billion logins from over 300 sites have been revealed by hackers

Over 300 different websites have been hacked so far, and a total of around 8 billion logins have been exposed. They are therefore found on lists of username and password combinations that are widely used by hackers. You can find a comprehensive list of all the websites that have been hacked over time here.

Some of the worst cases include the disclosure of logins for 165 million users on LinkedIn, almost 5 million on Snapchat, and 359 million on MySpace. As recently as January 2019, the largest leak in history occurred when 773 million usernames and associated passwords were shared across multiple sites online under the name “ Collection #1″.

Hackers can use the lists to access users' accounts, which they will usually try to abuse for personal gain. If one of your logins is found on these lists, you can therefore expect that you will try to hack it sooner or later. If you have used the same login in several places, you are at even greater risk of unauthorized access to one of them.

Check if your logins have been revealed

To help you investigate whether one or more of your logins have been revealed, we have made a small tool. If that is the case, then there are lists mentioned above which, in addition to being in the hands of hackers, have also ended up among law-abiding persons.

All you have to do is enter the username you want to check and press the button. You can try out self-chosen usernames such as "Hestepige1990" as well as email addresses that are used in logins in many places.

The tool searches a logins database from sites that have been hacked or otherwise compromised. If the username is here, a list of the hacked sites where it has been used is returned.

Neither emails, user names nor passwords are registered VPNinfo.dk or haveibeenpwned.comwhich provides the API used.

How should the result be understood?

You will see below a screenshot of a check of an anonymous username found in the database. Here is a list of the hacked websites where the same username or email has been used.

In other words, the person's login (username and password) from the sites below is in circulation and can be misused by hackers. Therefore, passwords should be changed as soon as possible in all places, the same login is used - not just those on the list!

Use secure passwords to remember

A good password is easy to remember but hard to guess. We are often encouraged to use passwords with a mix of characters, numbers and symbols, but they are hard to remember and actually no harder to crack with brute force hacking , where a computer automatically tries millions of possible combinations of characters, numbers and letters per second.

Here, it is only the length of the password that is crucial, so the safest is actually for example. to choose some more or less random words and combine them into one password that is somewhat easier to remember than a series of strange characters, etc.

And then of course you should not use birthdays, phone numbers, etc. as passwords. They are the first thing a hacker will try. And then it is also a great idea not to use the same passwords on several websites.