micktiegs_8: So I got this email saying I've been 'pwned'. Kinda handy when I've actually received quite a lot of them. I'd link to the site, but I'm sure you're all too paranoid to use it. Oh, and the title refers to me using Neopets haha!
[start]
You've been pwned!
You signed up for notifications when your account was pwned in a data breach and unfortunately, it's happened. Here's what's known about the breach:
Breach: Neopets
Date of breach: 5 May 2013
Number of accounts: 26,892,897
Compromised data: Dates of birth, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Usernames
Description: In May 2016, a set of breached data originating from the virtual pet website "Neopets" was found being traded online. Allegedly hacked "several years earlier", the data contains sensitive personal information including birthdates, genders and names as well as almost 27 million unique email addresses. Passwords were stored in plain text and IP addresses were also present in the breach.
[end]
Other known sites I've been cited at were Forbes (just signed up to comment once), Raptr (signed up for some GOG promotion regarding Witcher 3) and apparently Ashely Madison. Funnily, I asked AM's support staff why my email had been flagged and they responded with 'there is no email verification on our site'... well, problem solved haha! To test the theory I signed up there as a female using my gmail and sure enough, I didn't get a verification sent to it.
Added a picture to show what I mean, but for some reason it doesn't show a few sites I was previously notified about.
So... How legit is this? I remember there was once a site that checks if emails got hacked (using lists from various sources),
It wasn't "gamified". I was reluctant to use it as I figured it could be a scam just to get my email address for spam...
Eventually I used it and all but one email was reported as being clean, the one that did list had just one incident.
Now I've checked a couple of email addresses and all turned out clean, including that one that was listed previously... How so?