♫ You have stolen
You have stolen
You have stolen my heart…♫

Lyrics and music by: Chris Carrabba, recorded by: Dashboard Confessional.

There are many news stories about identities and personal information being compromised on the web, but in many cases there are not many ways to verify if your online identity has been breached. For example a friend of mine had several charges appear monthly on her iTunes account that were not hers – it seemed that someone has compromised the account and was charging small amounts every month…small enough that most times, it wouldn’t be noticed…

Fortunately there is Pwned List (pwnedlist.com), a free way to check if your user name or email address matches one that is on Pwned’s list of compromised accounts.

What is the story behind Pwned?

The site started out as small research project with a rather simple premise. To discover how many compromised accounts can be harvested programatically in just a couple of hours. Well, needless to say, the results were astonishing. In just under 2 hours we had close to 30,000 accounts, complete with logins and passwords. The truly scary part, however, was the quality of data we were able to collect in such a short amount of time. The accounts we were able to retrieve consisted of email services, social media sites, merchants and even financial institutions. It was clear that something had to be done.

What does Pwned mean?

The word pwned comes from the hacker jargon ‘pwn’, meaning to compromise or control, specifically another computer (server or PC), web site, gateway device, or application. It is synonymous with one of the definitions of hacking or cracking.

The Pwned web service is currently offered by:

[A] small group of security researchers who work on it their spare time. We wanted to use our talents from years in the security industry and provide a free service for the average person that might or might not be particularly security savvy. Currently our team consists of Alen Puzic, Stephen Thomas as well as few other very talented individuals. You can contact us through our contact page our reach out to us via Twitter @PwnedList.

With Pwned, at least we can check to see if someone has stolen the heart of your online identity…