Erstellt am: 24. 1. 2014 - 12:14 Uhr

Today's Webtip: Security Check

The German BSI wants to help you find out if you have been compromised.

There have been quite a few high-profile log-in leaks the last couple of years. The type of data lost has ranged from faily complete collections of personal information to social networking log-ins or email account info.

Some of the leaked info has been dumped on paste-bin, some announced by the companies that suffered the leak and some just silently sold on to potentially nefarious purchasers. Your email account log-in could be compromised and you would never know.

The German Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik have found 16 million compromised accounts while analysing bot-nets. They have put together a service to help people find out wether or not their account is one of them. It's a service that is a bit nicer than searching a paste-bin dump, but it takes longer and has some security issues of it's own.

You can submit you addresses to be checked here: sicherheitstest.bsi.de

It will take a while to get an answer, and addies that haven't been found in their list will simply receive no answer. Something that might have seemed like a sensible idea at the time they came up with the service, but seems a bit less so now.

It seems the service itself has come under attack, and scammers are using phishing mails disguised as BSI results to grab more data. So, rather than just jumping off to the BSI site, read this article from Chip with the basic information, and then this one with a more complete guide to the test. That article has further links to information on what you can do if the test comes out positive, as well as some ways to test if your PC might be part of a botnet.

Now, excuse me, I have a bunch of passwords that need to be changed...