Taking a few days vacation, so no better thing to do than to sit and read NAT!

I came across this website reading a news article: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

This site gathers up all the hacked username data that has been publicly posted on the internet. You can enter your usernames (and email addresses) and see whether any of your accounts were part of a data breach. This site doesn't store the passwords though.

The data breaches are typically meant to gather passwords that are associated with a user account. So if you had an Adobe account when they were hit a few years ago, the bad guys would be able to test Facebook etc to see whether you used the same account name and password on that site.

Since you aren't giving haveibeenpwned.com passwords or anything, it should be safe. Make sure you trust me and my diligence though! If you are entering more than one username then the site could be used to link your various accounts. If it was a bad site, now they could match multiple passwords to multiple usernames and potentially get access to more accounts.

The only hacked site I had an account on was Adobe, which was really old news for me. I think that breach was when I stopped using the same password on multiple sites.

However, all my family members had Neopets accounts (I assume dormant!) that were part of a breach that just happened (I hadn't heard of it though). The kids are all older now, but I will be reviewing password protocol with them to make sure they haven't been using the same password on other sites.