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Your data has been leaked. What should you do?

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sunday

Your data has been leaked. What should you do?

August 2, 2026 — 5:00am

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Real Money, a free weekly newsletter giving expert tips on how to save, invest and make the most of your money, is sent every Sunday. You’re reading an excerpt – you can sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.

By now, we’re probably all sick of hearing it. Picking up your phone in the morning or turning on the TV and seeing that yet another major service provider has fallen victim to a data breach.

This week, it was Origin sheepishly letting nearly a million customers know that their information was leaked. The week before it was a national healthcare provider. And how could we forget the complete and utter debacles of Optus and Medibank, just in the past few years?

Along with being embarrassing and, to be honest, pretty unacceptable stuff from the company’s perspective, having your data leak onto various nefarious parts of the internet is a pretty big inconvenience.

(And if you’re wondering exactly how many times your information has been leaked online, you can check via HaveIBeenPwned.com – don’t panic, it’s a legitimate website. I’m at 14, beat that!)

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Take the Origin leak, for example. The company said that the information revealed could include........

© The Age