Breach notifications

Deb Guigley

I do not recall any of the sites reported to my email address

Flexx

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/95681/breach-notifications

If your email address is the one that is mentioned next to your community username then your email was part of many breaches that happened in the past.

You can check for the same by visiting the below stated website and by entering your email address there

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Regards

Alexandru_BD

Hello @Deb Guigley,

Before anything else, kindly be advised I have removed your email address next to your username, for privacy reasons. It is not recommended to display your personal email address on the public forum and the 'Title' field does not serve this purpose. You may display terms of address, such as "Mr, Sir, Mrs, Miss", initials for an academic degree, rank, office, etc. Even something original, should you desire, but please refrain from posting any sensitive data.

In regards to the breach notifications, it's important to get the full picture on how these are found and what they actually mean.

To find stolen data, we scan the dark corners of the web using various methods. Once the data is found, we use a proprietary system for identity resolution to discover the identity of the breached individual, so we can alert the person about the breach, even if the breach itself includes little or outdated information.

Most commonly, breaches include information about users’ emails, passwords, names and usernames, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Their exposed data creates a snowball effect that ultimately leads to the leak, sale, or trade of entire digital identities on the Dark Web.

Breaches are not necessary found on a specific website.

They are in a compilation of usernames, passwords, phone numbers, etc. found in archives or texts on the Dark Web, in general.

The Digital Identity Protection service raises awareness about your Digital Footprint (data exposed in Surface Web) and remediation steps for data breaches (data exposed in Dark Web). However, you would not be able to change the username for a specific website, but you will be informed that in that specific period, data about you has appeared in data lists on the dark web.

This means that you could become victim of a scam. As the purpose is to raise awareness of these breaches and the data involved can be various, there are no mitigation steps for the situation. If the breach was about a password, you could have changed it, but the breach can also involve other types of data, such as phone numers, address, etc. And if these are listed somewhere on the dark corners of the web, there is no possible way to retrieve or delete them from there, because you don't have control over that leaked information.

Specifically for the email address you can indeed use this website https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to check for leaks, as @Flexx suggested above.

I hope the information is helpful.

Regards