How to Verify If Your Accounts Were Sold in Data Breaches and Secure Them

Recent high‑profile account takeovers—such as former US President Obama, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Bill Gates—were used to solicit Bitcoin, highlighting the scale of credential theft.

Domestic data breaches

Weibo data of 538 million users sold on the dark web.

Jiaozhou Central Hospital in Qingdao leaked personal information of over 6,000 patients.

Bilibili popular uploader “Party Sister” lost hundreds of gigabytes of video assets.

Thousands of university students' information exposed across multiple campuses.

A bank in Zhejiang leaked customer data and was fined 300,000 yuan.

More than 50 million personal records from Nantong, Jiangsu were sold on the dark web.

Construction Bank employee sold over 50,000 customer records.

International data breaches

Nearly 500,000 servers, routers and IoT devices had passwords exposed.

Estée Lauder disclosed 440 million users' sensitive information due to insecure servers.

Israel’s electoral roll of 6.4 million voters was compromised.

2.67 billion Facebook accounts were listed for sale on the dark web.

Thailand’s largest mobile carrier leaked 8.3 billion user data records.

EasyJet suffered a cyber‑attack exposing 9 million customer records.

An adult website leaked over 10 billion sensitive user records.

You can check whether your own accounts have been traded on the dark web by visiting haveibeenpwned.com , which aggregates over 470 breach sources and more than 10 billion compromised accounts.

The site shows a red indicator if your credentials are known to be compromised and a green background if they have not yet appeared.

Because large‑scale password leaks are hard to prevent as a user, the best defense is to avoid reusing passwords across sites. If you find it inconvenient to remember unique passwords, use a password‑manager.

Popular password‑manager tools include:

KeePass – free, open‑source, highly compatible.

LastPass – notable for cross‑browser and platform support.

1Password – cross‑platform with high user approval.

Check your accounts today and, if compromised, secure them with a reliable password manager.