Recovering from a password hack

(Positive powerful tips to protect yourself and keep your identity safe)

If you have an account with a company that's been hacked. there's a 100% assurance that the hackers may have stolen your username and password.

Find out if you're compromised

Improve your passwords

No matter how secure your password is, it is useless when your account is compromised by hackers. Nowadays it is so stupid and not secure for you to use the same password on different accounts. In other to stay a bit secure, it is recommended that you employ different passwords for different accounts you conduct online, so you don't lose all your fishes on a single boat. 

A password manager isn't a reliable option in this case, except for those that can generate, change and manage unique, robust passwords for all your accounts sites and online activities.

Enable two-step verification

Two-step verification is one of the best ways to protect online accounts. Most commonly, the first step is entering your password and the 2nd step involves entering a code delivered on-demand to your phone. with this when if a hacker has your password, he doesn't have your phone, and won't be able to receive the passcode delivered to your phone. Therefore shouldn't be able to bypass that second step. 

Of course, this requires you to have your phone close at hand and able to receive text messages or call to get the code. 

You can also use an authorization app. It's also an extra measure in implementing security but nowadays it is advisable you go an extra measure in ensuring security environment for your online activities.

Keep an eye on your financial or credit accounts.

Your email address and some other personal details are associated with your financial, credit or debit card account. Nowadays most bank has systems in place to track suspicious activity. You can do your part by opening up your at-risk accounts and checking your account activity yourself. You'll know better than anyone if a purchase was yours or authorised by you or not.

Delete any old unused  accounts

It is necessary you delete any old unused accounts. This is another way a password manager comes into consideration. When it first imports all your passwords, you can see a full list of every account you have. Then it's a matter of working your way through them and determining which ones you want to deactivate.

You'll have to manually visit each site in turn and figure out how to actually delete your account. You can also use Accountkiller to Delete pages of hundreds of services.

More passwords have been exposed 

Recently 560 million passwords were exposed and surfaced online.
MacKeeper security research centre reported that a huge database of stolen passwords has surfaced online. This database is composed of passwords from a variety of sources.
Nowadays "Online safety" seems to be abstract but there are still steps you can take to protect yourself when breaches like this occur.

The surfaced database contains about 560 million passwords. 

Here's how to check if you are compromised

Meet Have I Been Pwned, this tool will help check the surfaced database to see if your email address appears in any database that has been compromised. 

It is quite a simple to use.

Steps 

1. Open Have I Been Pwned

2. Enter your email address or username

3. Click Pwned? to Check if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach