We all know how important it is to secure your email and keep your passwords private. Sometimes though, it’s not enough and the websites that you have trusted with your email address, password and other important details like your name and address get hacked and these details get stolen.

You may think that having your email address leaked isn’t the end of the world, but it could be.

Hackers will often use the other details in these security breaches, or information you have put out on social media to get access to your email account. From there use it to change your passwords on the other services you use, or worse, if you reuse passwords, they now have access to every account that uses that email address and password.

What would happen if someone got access to your Amazon account, where your credit card is linked? Or your Apple account, that has all your devices and your photos backed up in it? Or your bank account?

A lot of these services use your email as a master key to get you back into your account. If you forget your password, where does the password reset go to? If someone controls your email they can control most of the other services that you use.

How do I know if my company is affected?

To help you find if you’ve been affected and are potentially at risk, we’ve partnered with HaveIBeenPwned. They are the internet’s leading resource on data breaches, compromised websites and applications.

Enter your email (you can now also enter your phone number to see if it’s on a breach list) and we’ll check if it is included in one of the lists from a site that has been hacked. If you are on this list, then the first thing you should do is change your password as soon as possible. The second thing is to carry out a thorough cyber-security review of your organisation.

To make sure you’re using a good password, we’ve also added a password strength checker that you can use for free to check your own password, or generate a strong password automatically. Don’t worry though, we never see the password you enter, or the password that is generated for you. In fact nothing ever leaves your computer’s web browser.

If you want to find out more or what we can do to help improve your cyber-security, you can book a no obligation 15-minute zoom call with our Security Chief, Daniel McLaughlin, just click on the button below and book a time that suits you.

In addition to the tools above, we’ve written a book, Email Hijack, that we’re giving away free to companies that sign up below.

It wasn’t written to scare you, but sadly, it’s a real world event that we see happen to local businesses on a near weekly basis, and those are just the companies that reach out to us for help and advice.