My email address got leaked on the dark web. Is yours safe?

I had no idea that my email was leaked on the dark web because of the data breach of some websites where I had signed up.

It blew my mind when I saw that it was not a one-time incident but 5 times when my email was leaked on the dark web through multiple times data breaches that happened in the past.

I thought I should just share this with my audience to help them prevent any financial damage or any kind of damage for that matter.

I’ll share what happened with me and how you can protect your data in this internet era. Stay tuned!

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

What happened…?

So I was just checking my email on my phone and thought it’s a good idea to check the security updates and password change suggestions if I have any.

As I was scrolling through different options in my Gmail account like Personal Info, Security, Data and Privacy etc. I saw one option to check if my email address was leaked on the dark web. (👇See the image below)

First, I was surprised to even see this option because I thought my email security was taken care of by Google. I took it for granted.

But when I saw this option to ‘Run a scan’, I thought, let me just check it and see if my email was leaked on the dark web.

And the result was not what I expected. It just blew my mind.

My email address was not leaked once but 5 times through different data breaches on various websites in the last 4 years.

This included websites like Canva as well, which is a famous website for graphic designing.

Which are those websites and what info got leaked…?

Following are the websites whose data got leaked reportedly:

1. BigBasket (A grocery delivery company)
2. GetMyUni (A college search and review website)
3. Scrapped Gravatar Profiles ( A gravatar making website)
4. Canva ( A graphic designing company)