Spybot Identity Monitor: Check if Your Emails Were Part of a Data Breach

If there's one portal every user should visit to check whether their email addresses have been exposed in a data breach, it's Have I Been Pwned. Its databases are enormous, and the site's staff do an excellent job. There's also an API that other developers can use to build different programs and services. One of them is Spybot Identity Monitor, which gives us the possibility to check multiple email accounts and usernames at the same time.

We've talked about many massive breaches here at NeoTeo. One of the latest cases exposed more than 500 million credentials, which were essentially a compilation of previous attacks. It's likely that by now our primary email addresses have ended up on some spammer list. Extremists suggest we close those accounts immediately, but the problem isn't the email address. We just need to make sure we update passwords on affected services (effectively truncating the leaked username-password combination), use a password manager with random generation for greater robustness, and not reuse them. However, the first step is to get information. That's where Spybot Identity Monitor comes in.

Spybot Identity Monitor: Check All Your Emails and Exposed Usernames

Spybot Identity Monitor lets you enter several email accounts and/or usernames in its interface, and check the status of all of them at the same time against the Have I Been Pwned databases. Once it has determined the total number of breaches, you can click on an entry and get additional data, such as the exact date of the breach, the official announcement, what exactly was leaked, and the source. This is much more convenient than typing one account after another into Have I Been Pwned and waiting for the results.

Now, it's likely that some readers wonder why it's a good idea to enter email addresses and usernames into this application. On one hand, the Spybot product family is well known in the market; on the other... all those addresses and accounts have already been exposed. Spybot Identity Monitor's plan is to help us detect new breaches faster and more conveniently to contain the situation immediately. Don't hesitate to try it.

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