See if your email or username has been hacked

2011 has been called the year of the data breach, with hacker groups publishing huge troves of stolen data online almost daily. Now a new site called pwnedlist.com lets users check to see if their email address or username and associated information may have been compromised. Here is a statement from their website which tells what they are all about.

PwnedList is a tool that allows an average person to check if their online accounts have been compromised. The site started out as small research project with a rather simple premise. To discover how many compromised accounts can be harvested programatically in just a couple of hours. Well, needless to say, the results were astonishing. In just under 2 hours we had close to 30,000 accounts, complete with logins and passwords. The truly scary part, however, was the quality of data we were able to collect in such a short amount of time. The accounts we were able to retrieve consisted of email services, social media sites, merchants and even financial institutions. It was clear that something had to be done.At that moment PwnedList was born. We wanted to create a simple one-click service to help the public verify if their accounts have been compromised as a part of a corporate data breach, a malicious piece of software sneaking around on their computers, or any other form of security compromise. This site was designed to be secure from the ground up. Our data harvesters only extract usernames and emails from account dumps, everything else (including passwords) is discarded. Once extracted, emails and usernames are put through a one-way hash and the cleartext destroyed. Additionally, no data you enter as part of your query is ever stored by us in any shape or form. 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.

Go ahead and check out the site and see if any of your stuff has been compromised.