Data breaches are becoming more and more common these days, with hackers targeting both upcoming online services to global enterprises. With unauthorized access, these breaches expose your passwords to shadowy hackers with an aim to use the information for identity theft, financial scams, and other sinister cyber/real world crimes across the globe.
Most of these incidents do not have an immediate impact and hence are a ticking time bomb.
Enpass allows you to generate strong passwords for all your online accounts, and a password manager offers you the comfort of using unique passwords everywhere. With our increasing digital indulgence with constant security threats, these are basic measures one should adopt.
However, once a data breach has happened, your strong and unique password could also be compromised. Here’s how Enpass can help you eliminate any risk as a result of a breach.
What is ‘Have I Been Pwned’?
‘Have I Been Pwned’ is a free service that aggregates data breaches and helps people establish if they’ve been impacted by malicious activity on the web and if their personal information has been compromised.
The service has been created by Troy Hunt, an Australian web security expert known for public education and outreach on security topics.
How to check your compromised passwords?
Enpass lets you check your passwords against a database of 551,509,767 (and growing!) real-world passwords previously exposed in data breaches – maintained by ‘Have I Been Pwned’. The exposed passwords are unsuitable for ongoing use as they’re at much greater risk of being used to take over other accounts.
Here’s how you can check the hygiene of your passwords using the Enpass desktop app:
- From the ≡ menu in the Toolbar, select Tools, and then click on Check for Pwned Passwords.
- On the next screen, you’ll see a message to validate the operation. Click Continue.
You will now see the results. All the items that you’ve checked and contain pwned passwords will get listed in the Weak passwords list under Password Audit. You can find more details about the process here.
If you learn about a certain data breach at a service where you’ve had an account, you can also individually check the password of that item.
Enpass supports @haveibeenpwned, allowing users to check if their password has been compromised in any data breach.
Do you audit your important passwords frequently? pic.twitter.com/6jWliy5sLi
— Enpass (@EnpassApp) February 20, 2019
What should you do if your affected by a data breach?
If you find yourself affected by any data breach, change your compromised password immediately to a strong password.
We suggest you use the Enpass password generator to create strong and robust passwords for your accounts. The password generator also allows you to alter complexities of passwords and lets you create pronounceable and random passwords.