Common questions
How the check works, what happens to your data, and what the subscription does for you.
How does the check work?
We compare your email address against data from breaches that have become known. These are intrusions at online services where customer data was taken and subsequently made public.
The result is a rating from 0 to 2: nothing found, findings with no passwords involved, or findings where passwords were among the data taken. What counts is always the highest value across all findings, not the value of the most recent one.
What happens to my email address?
It is used for the comparison and is not then stored as one person’s query. No account is created, no profile, and no log entry that ties the check to you.
The result sits in a cache for a few hours, so that the same address is not looked up again on every visit. The key to that cache is a salted hash, not a readable address.
What exactly does level 2 mean?
Level 2 means this: in at least one breach that contains your address, passwords were among the kinds of data affected.
It does not mean that we know your password, or that we know what form it was held in. That detail is simply not part of the public data. Change the password concerned, and every identical one, regardless.
Nothing was found. Am I safe?
You are not in the data sets we evaluated – that is today’s picture and not a guarantee. Breaches come to light continually, often only years after the intrusion, and not every intrusion ever becomes public.
That is exactly what monitoring is for: you check once yourself, and after that the service gets in touch when something changes.
What should I do first after a finding?
Change the password of the service concerned, and change it everywhere else you have used the same password. Reused passwords are the real damage a breach does.
Then turn on two-factor sign-in wherever you can. It protects an account even when the password is known.
What does the subscription do?
It keeps monitoring your addresses after you have checked once. If one of them turns up in a newly disclosed breach, you get an SMS – not another email, which would land in a mailbox that may itself be the one affected.
Depending on the plan, cyber insurance and a password manager come with it. Plans start at CHF 4.90 per month.
Why an SMS and not an email?
Because the monitored address is itself what the alert is about. If a mailbox has been compromised, it is the wrong channel for the message that it has been compromised.
Can I have my password checked?
Yes, and the check takes place entirely in your browser. Only the first five characters of a check value are sent, and those look the same for many thousands of possible passwords; the comparison itself then happens locally on your device.
Your password does not leave your device, is stored nowhere and is never displayed – neither in full nor in part.
Is the service Swiss?
The application and its database run on Swiss infrastructure, operated by a Swiss company. The data on breaches comes from international sources; that cannot be solved any other way, because breaches are international.
Can I cancel at any time?
Yes. The subscription runs monthly and can be cancelled to the end of the current billing period.