How to monitor emails using Surfshark Alert

Surfshark Alert is a feature that helps you protect your email addresses. Hundreds of websites experience breaches each day when their stored information is leaked. That might include your passwords, email addresses, card details, and other data that you have entered when registering at some particular website. Alert scans the web for breaches and informs you about them so you can take specific actions immediately.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Surfshark Alert to prevent potential harm if your data is leaked. We will show you how to:

• Activate Surfshark Alert
• Monitor the breached data
• Add or remove new email addresses
• Customize Surfshark Alert settings

Activate Surfshark Alert

1. Log into your account on this page.
   
   
   
   
2. Head to the Alert tab and select Monitor emails. You will find this tab on the left pane.
   
   
   
   
3. If you're a first-time user, please take a moment to read and accept the terms of the Privacy Policy. Check the box and click Continue. 
   
   You will also have to enter your email address. Once you do, press Activate.
   
   
   
4. You will now need to verify your email address. Until it's verified, you will see a notification about Pending Verification.
   
   To verify the email address, head to your email inbox and look for the most recent letter from Surfshark. Open it, and click the button to verify your email.
   
   If you do not see the email, please check Spam and Promotion inboxes.
   
5. 2FA (2-factor authentication) must be activated on your account if you’d like to view sensitive breach data, such as passwords. This is necessary so that your personal information is only accessible to you. If you have enabled it already, proceed to the next step. If you haven't, press Turn on and follow the 2FA setup process.
   
   Here is a tutorial that will guide you through that.
   
   
   

Monitor the breached data

From the moment you verify your email address, it will be scanned daily. If any of your personal details appear in leaked databases - you will be notified via email.

In the main dashboard, you will find the most important data.

You can also always check your dashboard for any data leaks. You will see a notification in the middle of the dashboard if at least one of your accounts gets breached. If it’s green and says No new breaches - good news, your email wasn’t found in any leaked databases.

1. If at least one of your accounts gets breached, you will see that in the Alert dashboard.
   
   
   
   
   
2. You can find more information about every breach if you click the black arrow on the right side.
   
   
3.  If you notice that your account is compromised, here is what you should do ASAP:
   
   • Check what information was exposed. That could be your password, email address, name, surname, etc.
   • Head to the website that was breached and change your password, email, and other personal information if that's possible.
   • If your password was compromised, make sure you're not using the same password on other websites or platforms.
   
   
4. Once you change your passwords and other personal details, you can archive old breaches by pressing the archive button.
   
   
   
   NOTE: if you do not have 2FA enabled, you won't be able to check information such as passwords and will see the following alert:
   
   
   
5. Archived information from all breaches will fall into dedicated folders.
   
   The Breaches folder holds the history of your experienced breaches;
   The Usernames & passwords folder stores your usernames, email addresses, and passwords are stored in Usernames & passwords folder;
   The Other information folder is for unspecified information, like ZIP codes, names, phone numbers, home addresses, etc.
   Some websites might also collect information about your location and IP address. If this information gets leaked, it will appear in the IP addresses folder.
   

Customize Surfshark Alert settings

You can also customize Alert settings to fit your personal preferences. To do so, head to the Settings tab that you will find on the left pane.



Breach report will send you quarterly or yearly summaries of all breaches that have happened during that time. To enable the Status report, move the switch to the right, then choose how often you would like to receive these statistics.

Move to the Breach alerts section to choose which emails will receive notifications. You can choose if you want all breach alerts to be sent to the primary email inbox or to each affected email individually.

Lastly, there is an option to remove all the data from your Alert account. Keep in mind that this data will only be removed from your account but not from leaked databases.

Add or remove new email addresses

You can add and monitor an unlimited number of email addresses. Those can be your own or your family members' emails.

To add new emails, click the plus sign at the top of the Alert dashboard. All new emails must be verified, so you will need to repeat the email verification process.

You can remove emails that you don't want to monitor anymore by clicking on the trash bin icon.

Congratulations - you have successfully configured Surfshark Alert! 

You may also be interested in:

1. How to use Surfshark Search?

2. How to enable 2FA for multiple users?

3. How to watch Netflix with Surfshark?