How to check if your email address or password has been in a data breach

We'd just lifted a Dell Latitude from the bench when the phone rang – the owner was frantic, half‑asleep, and told us their whole morning was gone because they couldn't log into their email after a ransomware warning. That kind of panic is exactly why you need a quick, reliable way to see if your address or password has turned up in a breach. Is my email address exposed in a data breach? Yes – you can check it in seconds. The easiest method is to visit Have I Been Pwned and type your address into the search box. If it appears in any of the listed incidents, the site will show the name of the breach, the date it was discovered and how many other accounts were affected. We see this a lot when a client’s corporate Microsoft 365 account shows up in a 2023 Adobe breach – the email was still active, but the password hadn't been changed since 2019. How can I find out if my password has been compromised? Never type your full password into a public site. Instead, use the “Pwned Passwords” API that the same service provides. You can paste the first five characters of the hash; if the remainder matches a known leak, the service will tell you how many times that exact password has been seen. On Windows we often run the free Credential Guard check via PowerShell: Get-CompromisedPassword -HashPrefix "5baa6" . It returns a simple true/false, and it never sends your whole password over the internet. What free tools can I use right now? Have I Been Pwned (email and password hash lookup). Goog