Your iPhone holds a lot of sensitive information: photos and videos, confidential messages and emails, bank details, and most especially your account passwords.
When someone gets ahold of your account passwords, anything in your accounts--may it be social media, email, Amazon, and frighteningly your bank account details--is open for the hacker to exploit.
You could lose your social media access, experience fraudulent transactions on your online shopping accounts (especially when you have your credit card linked to the shop already), and worse, have your identity stolen.
All in all, leaked passwords will cause a lot of trouble for you, and it's best to be very secure about your sensitive information.
How to Check If Your iPhone Passwords Are Compromised
Luckily, your iPhone has built-in helpers to keep your passwords from falling into the wrong hands, USA Today said.
Your Safari stores your passwords in Keychain, and it can be accessed from any of your iOS devices or iCloud. The passwords are checked against a list of breached passwords, informing you if you have been compromised.
The best part? This feature is turned on by default with iOS 14 devices.
To check, head over to Safari > Preferences > Passwords and look under Security Recommendations to see if any of your passwords were compromised. You will get a prompt to update our password with a stronger one. It will also let you know if you should have other passwords changed as well.
If your passwords are saved on Chrome, Password Manager has the Password Checkup feature built-in as well.
To check for compromised or weak passwords, head to passwords.google.com. In Password Checkup, select Check Passwords. Your login credentials are compared against the millions of known compromised accounts that have been part of major breaches, like the recent Facebook data leak, per The Verge. Then you can go ahead and check your saved accounts to see which ones need to have an updated password.
You can also discover some forgotten accounts that you may no longer need, and it's best to just delete those accounts to lessen the risk of being compromised through accounts you may have forgotten existed.
You can also check the reputable services of HaveIBeenPwned to see if your e-mail address matches the database of known breaches. The website only needs your email, not your password.
If your information has been leaked by any data breach, the website will let you know, right down to the specific incidents.
HaveIBeenPwned will also help you protect your loved ones because they publish breach information for any email address, so you can check up on their account security as well, PC World added.
How To Prevent Hackers From Getting Into Your Accounts
Data breaches can be dangerous when information are sold in the Dark Web, where hackers can buy them for cheap and use that username and password combination on other platforms and websites. This is why you need to use unique and strong passwords for each account, not just using one "universal" password.
You can also set up two-factor authentications and verifications for your accounts to fortify your account security.
