Pwned: hacker slang for compromising the security of, or taking control over, a system, application, website or similar.
In October 2013, 153 million accounts of registered Adobe users were stolen. In 2011, millions of PlayStation Network user accounts were exposed. These are just a couple of examples among the hundreds of services and websites whose security has been compromised.
Knowing this, a good question to ask would be: how does this affect me?
Maybe not at all, or maybe a lot. Let me explain:
How many of you use a different password for every site?
How many of you always use the same one everywhere?
Are you sure none of the websites or services where you signed up with that password has been breached?
What could happen if you had an account on one of those servers?
If you don’t have an answer to all these questions, let me shed some light. All that stolen data can easily be found online. With a few Google searches, someone with bad intentions could find our email address in one of those lists, together with the password we signed up with. And if we used that same password for every service, someone will be able to get into our email, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal or hosting account, to name a few. They could spy on all our data anonymously, or take control and lock us out of our own accounts.
How can we find out whether our username or email address is on one of those lists?
Some websites index these lists and can tell us, with a single query, whether we’ve been pwned. The best known is haveibeenpwned.com: a simple search for our email address will tell us whether our password might be roaming freely around the internet. (The original article also recommended pwnedlist.com, which has since shut down.)
I had to take action myself after learning that my account was among the 153 million stolen from Adobe. And you, now that you know, what are you going to do?
Update: today the best defence is a password manager, with a different password for every service, plus two-factor authentication wherever it’s available.
Translated with the help of AI from the original article.