Type your email address into this site.
There's a decent chance it comes back with bad news.
Have I Been Pwned is a free database of over 14 billion accounts that have been exposed in data breaches. Every time a company gets hacked and their user data leaks onto the internet — passwords, emails, phone numbers, home addresses — Troy Hunt adds it to the database. You type your email. It tells you if you're in there. Which breaches. What data was exposed. When it happened.
The list is longer than you think. LinkedIn. Adobe. Dropbox. MySpace. Yahoo — twice. Canva. Dubsmash. 500px. Companies you use every day and companies you forgot existed. Hundreds of breaches, billions of records. The odds that your email appears in at least one of them are higher than most people want to admit.
The site also has a password checker. You type a password — any password, even one you're currently using — and it tells you if that exact password has ever appeared in a breach. Not whether your account was hacked. Whether that password, as a string of characters, is sitting in a leaked database somewhere. If it is, it's in a hacker's dictionary. Change it today.
Troy Hunt built this in 2013 as a side project. He's an Australian security researcher who kept seeing breach data circulate online and thought people deserved to know if their information was in it. He's been maintaining it ever since, mostly alone, mostly for free. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies now partner with him to add breach data he couldn't get otherwise.
He made one rule: the site never stores what you search. Type your email, get your answer, nothing is logged.
Go find out what's already out there.
Then go change your passwords.