LinkedIn. Twitter. Evernote. What do these companies have in common besides their popularity? They’ve all been hacked in the last year, and had customer data stolen.

Cybercriminals attack big companies for the big prize: user account information. With email addresses and passwords in hand, they go on an account-cracking spree across the Internet, hoping that some of the users in their massive heist are using the same weak passwords on multiple sites. It’s likely some of your accounts have already been
swept up in data breaches like this.

If the hackers are lucky they might gain other profitable information like addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers. They could gain access to your email and turn it into a spam generator, or they could commandeer your Facebook account and send pay-per-click scams to your friends. Everything they do with your data is money in their pockets.