How to check if your personal data has been leaked – for free

Data breachers are basically an everyday reality of modern life. If you have an email — it’s out there, or so we’ve learned to think. Every little app, every service and platform you sign up for will most probably have a leak or breach at one time or another. Or worse — some shadier businesses may just sell your details to data brokers outright.

Most of the time, there are protections in place so the worst thing that bad actors can do is obtain your email address. Not ideal, but not (yet) the end of the world. Still, it’s a good idea to be on top of these things — to know when a breach has happened and what exactly has been compromised.

Thankfully, Surfshark’s plethora of security tools also include a data breach alert as a part of the affordable Surfshark One package. Even better, you can do a quick Surfshark Alert scan for free and see exactly what the service monitors and what it can do for you before ever committing to anything.

Surfshark Alert — the data watchdog

Surfshark is no longer simply a VPN service. With security and privacy at the core of the company’s values, it has developed multiple tools to help you stay anonymous and to divert hackers, phishers, or simply spammers away from your phone and your email (see Surfshark Alternate ID).

The data leak checker is a part of the Surfshark One package and can help you find out if a certain email address has been leaked. You can initiate a scan manually, but once Surfshark Alert has your details, it will make sure to inform you whenever they are subject to a breach again.

Check if your data has been leaked right now, for free

Surfshark Data Leak Checker free scan

The Surfshark Alert page is accessible for free. Just enter your email address and you will get back any information that Surfshark has on recent breaches — including what exactly has leaked. It could be just the email, which isn’t too bad. It could be your hashed password (just the number of characters) — OK fine. I just found out that a couple of websites leaked my full passwords, and a couple more — my IP address. Not great!

You only get to see the top 9 results for free, but that should be good enough to show you how Surfshark Alert works, what it can do for you, and for you to decide whether you need it.

A two-year subscription for Surfshark One comes with a +3 month bonus and will cost you $72.63 billed bi-yearly ($2.69 per month). This includes the full Surfshark VPN service with servers in more than 100 countries, Dynamic MultiHop which constantly swaps your IP to a different location, and no limit on the devices on one account. On top of that, you get Alternate ID to spoof your own email when signing up to random websites, Antivirus in the VPN server, no-tracking searches, and the aforementioned Surfshark Alert.

Surfshark One+ adds on top of that with Incogni — the service, which allows you to scrub your data from data brokers’ libraries, once it has (inevitably) leaked.

Get Surfshark here

What to do if my data has leaked

If the Data Leak Checker indicates that your information has been compromised, consider the following actions:

• Change Passwords: Immediately update passwords for affected accounts. Don’t use the same password for multiple services, platforms, and apps.
• Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) where possible
• Monitor Financial Statements: Nowadays, banks are pretty vigilant about suspicious transactions. But it’s more than a good idea to keep an eye on your statements yourself. Contact your bank immediately if you notice something suspicious.
• Stay Vigilant: It goes without saying, but always double- and triple-check any emails that claim to be from an official service and require you to enter or change your password. 99% of the time, it’s a phishing attempt.
• Use Incogni to request data brokers delete anything they have on you