How to Check if Your Email Was Leaked (Have I Been Pwned)

Go to Have I Been Pwned (type it yourself)

Your email is probably sitting in a leaked database somewhere. Let’s check — it takes 30 seconds.

Go to haveibeenpwned.com. Now, this is very important: type it yourself. Do not click it from anywhere else, and especially don’t click it from an email or an ad.

Enter your email and read your results

Once you’re there, enter your email and press Check. I’m going to use thisismyemail@example.com as an example. Press Check — and surprisingly, there is one data breach on that email.

Once you can see how many data breaches you got, scroll down and you’ll see each one of the breaches: when it happened and exactly what was leaked. Do this for every email you’ve ever had. Take a screenshot and keep it — you’re going to need it.

Two features I skip: the password check

Now, there are two features I skip. First is the password check. It’s well built, but my rule is simple: only type a password into the site it belongs to. Your password manager already flags leaked ones anyway — something like 1Password, which you can even see from here. It can also be Google or Apple.

Why I skip Notify Me

The second one I won’t use is the Notify Me button. Whether you got green or red, it doesn’t matter — I will not use Notify Me at all. Why? Because if I never sign up, then any breach alert email that I get is fake. I can just come here and check manually every few months. It only takes 30 seconds.

What to do if you got pwned

Now, if you did get pwned, change that password, plus anywhere else you reused it. Use a password manager — again, like 1Password, Google, or Apple. Turn on two-factor authentication (or multi-factor authentication), and start with your email. If something sensitive was leaked, like your Social Security number, freeze your credit completely.

Bonus: search for data breach settlements

Another bonus thing you can do: in this case, this is the Adobe breach, so you can search for the company name — here, “Adobe data breach settlement.” This one was in 2013, so of course it’s already resolved, since it was a long time ago.

Real example: the Canadian Tire breach (2025)

But if I search for another one of my emails that was already breached, I can see there’s Canadian Tire in 2025, which had a lot of compromised data: dates of birth, email addresses, genders, names, partial credit card data, passwords, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Ouch. Yeah, it was not nice to find out about that.

So again, instead of Adobe, let’s search for “Canadian Tire data breach settlement 2025.” There’s no final financial settlement yet, but there is a proposed class action lawsuit filed in July 2026. You can look up these kinds of things and sign up — for example, in these two.

What not to give a settlement site

Just very important: you do not have to pay anything to get your money back. And you shouldn’t have to input anything other than your email, because that’s what was compromised — the lawyers will probably just get back to you at some point. Other than that, do not provide PINs, passwords, credit card data, and so on.

Also, it’s probably going to be a few dollars, not a huge amount. So don’t think it’s going to be a hundred thousand million dollars or something like that.

Wrap-up

So that was a summary. Go to the link in the description of the video to read the whole blog post, and go check your emails — all of them, even the one you created back in 2000. You’ll be surprised where it’s been. All right, see you later. Bye!