I used to think password managers were overkill until I saw my own email in a breach dump from 2019

Reese Perez · 2026-10-08T21:50:03.337534+00:00

I always figured my system of using the same three passwords with little tweaks was fine, you know, like adding a 1 or an exclamation point at the end. Then last month a buddy sent me a link to Have I Been Pwned and I typed in my main email just for fun, and it showed up in a data dump from a fitness forum I signed up for back in 2019. The site had leaked 2.3 million accounts, and my password was sitting right there in plain text next to my email. I spent that whole night changing passwords on 14 different sites, and I still find old accounts I forgot about. Now I use Bitwarden and let it make up random 16 character passwords for everything, and honestly it takes me maybe 10 extra seconds per login. The part that got me was that the breach happened 5 years ago and nobody ever told me. Has anyone else found their email in a dump and had that same sick feeling in their stomach?

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I used to think password managers were overkill until I saw my own email in a breach dump from 2019 | Cybersecurity Tips - Chatter Central