According to the company, for every record they found, they found a corresponding IP address, email address, and at least one password. The total size and scale of this breach was enormous, spanning more than 1,100 different websites and in excess of 45 million user account records. This, of course, is on top of the literally hundreds of millions of compromised accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and other popular websites across the internet.
By now, the writing should be on the wall in a font big enough for all to see. You are not safe. Your account information is not safe. If you use the same password across multiple sites, then your identity itself is not safe, because a hacker can get your “master password” from any one of the breaches mentioned above, and access your credit accounts, your bank accounts, and pretty much everything else you have.
End result? The hackers will have everything you once owned, and you’ll have nothing.
Yes, you can get it back…probably. If you don’t mind spending 2-3 years of your life chasing ghosts and phantoms if you’re lucky. The good news is: you don’t have to go through all of that. You can change all your passwords right now, and use a different password for every account you have.
Or, you can do nothing and hope you get lucky. Hope that the law of large numbers works in your favor, and that the hackers will simply pass you by. They might. There are a lot of other accounts they could clean out, but do you really want to take that chance? Change your passwords. All of them. As soon as you finish reading this.