So you’ve been hacked, or think you might have been hacked? There are a few immediate actions that you should carry out to reduce the impact of the hack. We are going to cover some top tips.

Before you continue, if you haven’t checked out our top 10 tips for staying safe online blog, then you should. The post gives you some achievable and useful tips for how to reduce the chance of you being hacked.

Haven’t been hacked yet? You’d be surprised..

If you’ve come here without experiencing a breach / hack, and you haven’t used mappd before, then brace yourself. You will likely be surprised that somewhere along the line you have been involved in some form of breach. If you don’t want to use mappd, there are other breach notification services, namely haveibeenpwned.com which we use to feed our breach information and password checker among others.

Now you know you’ve been involved in a hack, what should you do?

1. Change all of your passwords

Changing your passwords is one of the first things you should do as soon as you find out you have been hacked. This means that your compromised password cannot be used to access other accounts. Now this isn’t much of an issue if you use seperate passwords across accounts.

2. Revoke access to your accounts, especially if it’s been hacked

Most accounts and services have the ability to revoke access. This is also referred to as ‘log out all sessions’ or ‘log out of all devices. This means that if an attacker is in your account, you can kick them out (digitally). Assuming that you had changed your password, they will no longer have access.

3. Set up the security on your accounts, i.e. supsicious notifications

If your services have the ability to enable suspicious notifications or an advanced security funtion, enable it. You will not realise how beneficial it will be until it’s too late.

4. Enable Two-Factor Authentication

The use of two-factor authentication dramatically reduces your risk of compromise and we can’t stress this enough. Two factor required a text or code in addition to your username and password. If your password is stolen, the attacker will not be able to get access. Most services now offer this and if they don’t – send them a note!

5. Consider reviewing your security questions if you’ve been hacked

Dependant on what has been stolen, sometime it may also include security details. Especially if you use personal information as security details. When you check your breach in mappd, double check to see if this has been stolen too. If it has been, change your security details across your accounts.

6. Reduce the amount of places where your data is

So you’ve been hacked and don’t want it to happen again? Reduce the amount of places where your information is. The less places where your data is, the less likely it is to be stolen and this is basic digital hygeine. In your mappd app, request your data to be deleted from those companies that you don’t recognise or no longer want to share data with.

7. Sign up to mappd or another breach notification service

Signing up to mappd or another breach notification service (some of our services are based on Have I Been Pwned APIs) will ensure that you are alerted should you be involved in a hack. This allows you to work on making youself more secure before the criminals get to you.

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