“Pwned” is a verb, commonly used as a gloating expression of dominance, control, or victory. This peculiar term is used most often in video games, though it has found its way into offline conversation. When you’re pwned, you’ve been defeated by an opponent, often in a humiliating fashion. It also carries connotations of great failure on the loser’s part.

The origins of “to pwn” are uncertain, but it is likely to have sprung from the slang use of “owned.”

In terms of email, it means your account has been hacked and information used in some way.

The owner of the website is Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional awardee for Developer Security, blogger at troyhunt.com, international speaker on web security and the author of many top-rating security courses for web developers on Pluralsight.

“Data breaches are rampant and many people don’t appreciate the scale or frequency with which they occur. By aggregating the data here I hope that it not only helps victims learn of compromises of their accounts but also highlights the severity of the risks of online attacks on today’s internet.”

So, to find out if your email accounts have been hacked visit a website called: Have I Been Pwned? CLICK HERE

Their home page tells you a lot about how many hacks are actually going on. The statistics are mind-boggling.

Nearly 6 billion accounts have been hacked and scrolling down their homepage reveals breaches to all manner of websites on a massive scale.

For those of you who are interested, you can search through ‘pastes‘ containing email addresses exposed in potential data breaches but the basic search does all that for you.

As for me? I checked with Pwned and have a personal email account that was hacked twice. The TruePublica email account recorded no hacks and nor did our encrypted email account.

However, it’s still unnerving to find out one of them has been hacked. I asked a colleague of mine to check their email account and she found it had been hacked six times!

All you then have to do is change your password and hope for the best. And of course, its always a good idea to change your password regularly anyway.

Pwned also offers a password protection service including notifying you of any breaches meaning that you can change that password quickly. At the time of writing, you get 30 days free and then it’s $2.99 a month. In today’s world, that’s not bad value for money.