With more and more data breaches happening every day, it's very likely your employees' information is available for free or purchase to whoever knows how to find them. BenefitMall, Ascension, Facebook, 500px, Dunkin’ Donuts, Dow Jones, Rush University Medical Center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are just few of the many companies that reported data breaches in just the first few months of 2019. Most commonly you will hear people refer to the place where your credentials are the product as the Dark Web or Deep Web. Here is the problem,  yes, the dark web is a place that requires some special tools and knowledge on how to access and navigate that is teaming with stolen credentials and all kinds of other things that will make you lose sleep; however, many of your breached company credentials are also sitting right on the same internet that you are watching endless cute puppy videos on.

If you have had a business email address for more than a few months there is a very high probability that at least one your credentials or company email addresses have been breached or scraped from somewhere. Even if you were lucky enough to not use one of the sites that has been breached in the last several years that doesn't mean that you are safe. For example, if you have ever received a marketing email from ANY company your email address could be out there so it can be used as a target for phishing attacks. Verifications.io that was discovered in March of 2019 is a perfect example. Verifications.io was an email validation company that allowed marketers to verify the accuracy of their email lists had their database on an unprotected server that was accessible to anyone who knew where to look. Nearly 1 billion email accounts, along with other personal information were exposed. It was one of the largest single-source data breaches ever recorded.