Online security is important, and your accounts’ security is determined by how secure your password is. This is why it’s important to make your passwords long and complex; they end up being harder to guess. Unfortunately, no matter how good your passwords are, at some point, you’re likely to be involved in some sort of data breach.
Data breaches are pretty regular things now and can affect websites of any size, small or huge. To try to avoid any bad publicity, sometimes breached sites choose not to inform the affected users. This is despite their personal data being available for sale on the internet. Without this step of the company informing you that your data has been involved in a breach, you can be left in the dark, thinking your data is private when it isn’t. In the worst cases, this data can include your password, contact details, or even payment details.
One of the useful extra features that Bitwarden offers checks to see if your username has been involved in a data breach. This tool allows you to double-check that your usernames have not been affected, even if the service has decided not to inform you.
Tip: Sites that offer data breach monitoring only let you search by username. They never return any of the specific values that were associated with your entry in a data breach. This is a security decision, so no one can use the service to discover your passwords.
How to Check If You’ve Been Affected by a Data Breach
To use the data breach report offered by Bitwarden, you need to sign into the Bitwarden web vault. Once you’re signed in, switch to the “Tools” tab, then select the bottom-most tool, labeled “Data breach report.” Enter the username you want to check for, then click “Check breaches.”
Tip: Your account email address will be filled in the username box by default. However, you can change that, which is helpful if you use multiple accounts and usernames across different services.
Hopefully, your results will show that your usernames have been unaffected by any known data breach. In the increasingly likely event that you have been affected, you’ll be able to see a description of the published information. If “Passwords” are mentioned, then you should take the opportunity to change your password for that site. If you reused that password anywhere else, you should also change it there too.
Data breaches can affect anyone. To help you see if you’ve been affected by one, Bitwarden offers a data breach report tool. By following the steps in this guide, you can use Bitwarden’s data breach report tool to see if any of your passwords have been affected. If you have been affected by a breach, it’s recommended that you change the affected password.
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