I Checked My Email Against Every Breach Database. Here's What I Found
The Moment I Got Genuinely Scared
It started with a weird email from LinkedIn. Not a phishing attempt — I've gotten plenty of those and I know what they look like. This was a legitimate notification telling me someone had tried to log into my account from an IP address in Romania. I hadn't been to Romania. I don't know anyone in Romania.
I changed my LinkedIn password, went back to sleep, and told myself it was probably nothing. That was a mistake. A few days later, my old PayPal account — one I barely used anymore — sent me a receipt for a $47 charge to a gaming site I'd never heard of. That woke me up.
I spent the next two weekends doing something I probably should have done years ago: I systematically checked every email address I'd ever used against every breach database I could find. What came back shook me more than I expected.
Starting With the Obvious: Have I Been Pwned
If you haven't used HaveIBeenPwned.com, stop reading this and go do it right now. Troy Hunt built it, it's free, and it aggregates data from hundreds of breaches. I typed in my main email — the one I've had since 2009 — and the page turned red immediately.
Seventeen breaches. Seventeen.
Adobe, Dropbox, LinkedIn (there it was), a gaming forum I'd completely forgotten about, a recipe website from 2011 that apparently got completely demolished in 2019. The list went on. Some of these breaches had exposed just my email address and username. Others had exposed my password hashes. A few — the ones that made my stomach drop — had exposed passwords in plaintext.
Then I checked my secondary email. The one I use for shopping and newsletters. Nine breaches. Then my old university email, which I still have forwarding access to. Six more. Then a work alias I'd used at a startup that folded years ago. Four breaches, including one that had happened after the company shut down, meaning their data had been sitting on a decommissioned server somewhere, unsecured.
Grand total across four addresses: 36 breaches. Spanning 15 years of digital life.
Going Deeper: The Databases HIBP Doesn't Have
Have I Been Pwned is good, but it's not exhaustive. There are breach collections floating around on dark web forums that never get formally indexed. I wanted to go further, so I started looking at a few other tools.
DeHashed is one that security researchers use — it's paid but it lets you search by email, username, IP, name, and even password fragments. I found two additional exposures there that HIBP didn't have: a forum for a niche hobby of mine and a meal-prep subscription service I'd tried once in 2018 and immediately canceled. My password from that service — the specific one — had shown up in a combolist file being sold on a Telegram channel.
I also used Firefox Monitor (which is just a cleaner HIBP interface) and Google's Password Checkup built into Chrome. The Chrome tool was particularly eye-opening because it checked my saved passwords against known breach data in real time. It flagged eleven passwords as compromised. Eleven passwords I was still actively using.
One of them was the password to my bank's mobile app.
Reconstructing How the Damage Actually Happened
Here's what I pieced together sitting there with a cold cup of coffee at 11pm on a Saturday: I had been using three or four "base" passwords for years. I'd add a number or a special character depending on what the site required, but the core word was always the same. It was a system that felt clever when I invented it at age 19. It was catastrophically stupid.
Once my password leaked from that 2012 Adobe breach, anyone with the right tools could run variations of it against thousands of other sites automatically — a technique called credential stuffing. My LinkedIn account didn't get targeted because someone specifically wanted to get into my LinkedIn. It got hit because a bot tried my Adobe password (and predictable variations of it) across thousands of sites simultaneously, and it worked.
The PayPal charge made sense now too. Same breach data, different bot, slightly different password variation. The $47 charge was actually small. I got lucky.
The Cleanup: What I Actually Did (In Order)
I'm going to be specific here because most advice on this topic is frustratingly vague. "Use a password manager" is not actionable when you have 300+ accounts and no idea where to start.
- Triage the high-value accounts first. Email, banking, investment accounts, anything tied to real money or identity documents. I changed all of these within the first hour, using genuinely random 20-character passwords from a generator. Not memorable. Deliberately unmemorable.
- Set up a password manager before doing anything else. I chose Bitwarden because it's open-source and the free tier is actually usable on multiple devices. I imported nothing from my browser — starting clean meant starting correctly. Every new password I set got stored there immediately.
- Enable 2FA everywhere that mattered. But here's the part nobody tells you: SMS-based 2FA is weak. SIM swapping is a real attack. For anything important, I switched to an authenticator app. TOTP codes through Ente Auth (I'd been using Authy but wanted something with encrypted backups I controlled). For my most sensitive accounts — email, financial — I got a hardware key.
- Work through the breach list systematically. For every service that had appeared in a breach, I logged in, changed the password, and checked what data the breach had exposed. If the breach included payment info, I called the card and requested monitoring. If I hadn't used the service in two years, I deleted the account instead of just changing the password. Dead accounts are attack surface you don't need.
- Deal with the email aliasing problem. This one took longer to fix but it's been the most valuable change. I now use SimpleLogin to generate unique email aliases for every new service I sign up for. When a breach happens, I can immediately see which service leaked (by which alias appears in spam), and I can kill that alias without it affecting anything else.
What I Found That Surprised Me Most
I expected the major breach names — Adobe, LinkedIn, Dropbox. Those get press coverage. What I didn't expect was how many tiny, obscure services had leaked my data. A forum I'd visited twice in 2014. A plugin download site. A contest entry form from a brand promotion I barely remembered entering. These small leaks are dangerous precisely because nobody is paying attention to them.
I also found something disturbing through DeHashed: an old username I'd used was appearing in breach data alongside a password I recognized — but connected to an email address I didn't recognize. Someone had created an account somewhere using my username and what appeared to be a variant of my password. I still don't fully understand how that happened. My best theory is account takeover followed by profile modification, but it was deeply unsettling to see evidence of someone operating as a version of me, even in a small corner of the internet.
Where I Am Now, Three Months Later
My breach exposure hasn't gone to zero — that's not really possible. Data that's already out there is out there. But my attack surface is dramatically smaller. Every account I care about has a unique, random password. I have 2FA on anything sensitive. My email addresses are compartmentalized. New signups get aliases.
The thing that changed most is my mental model of how this stuff works. I used to think of account security as a lock on a door. Strong lock, safe house. What I understand now is that it's more like a web — if one strand is weak or broken, the whole thing is vulnerable in ways that aren't obvious until something goes wrong.
Checking your email against breach databases isn't a one-time task. I've now got HIBP monitoring set up on all my addresses, so I get notified when a new breach comes in. That $47 PayPal charge ended up being refunded after I disputed it. The lesson was worth a lot more than $47.
Go check your email. Right now. Whatever you find, it's better to know.