Here’s how to check if your email ID and password are exposed or not

An Australian cyber security researcher Troy Hunt has stumbled upon the details of more than 2 billion email IDs and passwords floating on the web. Earlier, he criticized the Aadhaar project as he found some errors in the code revealing emails and passwords in files upload on file sharing website MEGA. According to him, these details were stored in more than 12,000 separate files with a combined size of 87GB.

Earlier this week, he took to his blog to state that these files are not available anymore on the file sharing website but are still available in the web forums that are popular among the hackers. Hee claims that over 2 billion emails were found to be leaked in the data dump, which could have been collected from several data breaches in the past. He further claims that there were duplicate entries making only around 700 million of these emails unique.

This data has been loaded into HIBP (Have I Been Pwned). Given that the data has been loaded here, you can find out if your email ID has been compromised from here. You can head on to https://haveibeenpwned.com/and search with your email ID. It is also possible to check the status of the password that you use or used as well from https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords.

What to do if your email ID and password are exposed

If the tool finds that your email ID and password have been exposed, then you should do the following.

• Change your passwords immediately 
• Opt for two-factor authentication on all services
• Revoke permissions to all services where you use our email ID

It is always important to know that you use a different password for each of the services even if the email ID is the same. It is a good practice to use unique passwords for different services.