This Site Says It Will Tell If Your Gmail Password Was Hacked
As you may have heard, Russian hackers have published the passwords for roughly five million Gmail accounts. This follows the publication of millions of passwords for two of Russia's largest email services, Yandex and Mail.Ru,
Chances are, your account is not one of the hacked Gmail accounts because that "five million" figure only represents a small fraction of the number of Gmail accounts that are active in the world today. For instance, the Gmail app has been downloaded one billion times to Android devices. Even back in 2012, Gmail had 350 million users.
But a group of programmers have decided to help you check your email all the same. A website called Isleaked.com will tell you if your email is one of the 5 million. Just type in your email and if its been hacked, the website will show you the first two letters of your password.
When we tried it it told us our email was not leaked.
We contacted the developers who told us that they originally created the site to help people check with the Yandex and Mail.Ru attacks, and fired up an English website when the database of Gmail addresses became public.
The developers say they are not collecting email addresses to spam you later, and to back that up, they do not require you to tell them your full email. You can substitute asterisks for some of the letters and they'll do the search based on what you've given them.
But, whether your Gmail was leaked or not - or whether or not you want to check it on Isleaked.com - there's one easy thing you can do to better your protect yourself: change your password and then add another security step called "two-step verification." That means Google will send you a special code to use as an extra password to login to your account. While that sounds like a headache, it's not that bad to use, and will protect you from hacks like this one.