I was getting some very unpleasant pornography, which I never have received with any of my other e-mail providers.

That'll teach you to click on those dodgy links.

After a spate of high-profile data breaches, including those at social networking sites LinkedIn and MySpace, which have affected hundreds of millions of accounts in total, it's important to know whether you've been hacked. Thankfully, there's a quick, free and easy way to see if you're at risk from a number of recent data breaches.

How to check if your account's been hacked

Go to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and enter your email address. Use any address you're concerned may have been hacked – for example, the one you usually log in to LinkedIn with.

It'll tell you if your account's been hacked. You'll be shown a list of breaches you were 'pwned' in, with some background info on the hack, plus what data was compromised – eg, email address, password, date of birth, etc.

If my details aren't on there does that mean I haven't been hacked?

No – the website won't tell you everywhere you may have had data stolen from, so you still need to be vigilant. The site itself acknowledges it only has "a small subset of all the records that have been breached over the years".

Modern Business Solutions: In October 2016, a large Mongo DB file containing tens of millions of accounts was shared publicly on Twitter (the file has since been removed). The database contained over 58M unique email addresses along with IP addresses, names, home addresses, genders, job titles, dates of birth and phone numbers. The data was subsequently attributed to "Modern Business Solutions", a company that provides data storage and database hosting solutions. They've yet to acknowledge the incident or explain how they came to be in possession of the data.

Compromised data: Dates of birth, Email addresses, Genders, IP addresses, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses