How to monitor emails using Surfshark Alert

NOTE: The video above reflects an older version of Surfshark and will be updated shortly.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Surfshark Alert. To proceed, you need an active Surfshark One or Surfshark One+ subscription. You can find the available plans on Surfshark’s pricing page.

We will cover the following:

1. What is Surfshark Alert?
2. Activate Surfshark Alert
3. Monitor the breached data
4. Add or remove new email addresses
5. Customize Surfshark Alert settings

What is Surfshark Alert?

Surfshark Alert is a feature that helps you protect your email addresses, credit cards, and personal identification numbers by monitoring their appearance on public leaked data databases.

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 entered when registering at some particular website.

Alert scans the web for data leaks and informs you about them so you can take specific actions immediately.

Additionally, Surfshark's Alert feature will inform you about malware attacks, which happen when malware software allows hackers to access sensitive information and/or steal valuable data. In case your email address is breached due to malware on your device, you will be notified immediately.

Activate Surfshark Alert

1. Go to the Surfshark login page and log in.
   
   
   
2. Find the Alert tab on the left panel and select Monitor emails.
   
   
   
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 confirm your email.
   
   

   NOTE: Check Spam and Promotion inboxes if you do not see the email.

   
   
5. We recommend activating the 2FA (2-factor authentication) on your account.
   If you have enabled it already, proceed to the next step.
   
   If you haven't, go to your Account settings, press Turn on, and follow the Surfshark 2FA setup process.
   
   

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.

1. In the main Alert dashboard, you will find the most important data.
   
   
2. You can also check your Alert dashboard for any data leaks. You will see a notification in the middle if at least one of your accounts gets breached. If it’s green and says No breaches detected — your email wasn’t found in any leaked databases.
   
   
3. If at least one of your accounts gets breached, you will see that in the dashboard. You will also notice that there is an indication of the severity of the breach. We recommend addressing the ones with High severity first.
   
   
   
4. You can find more information about every breach by clicking the black arrow on the right.
   
   
   
5.  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 possible.
   
   NOTE: If your password was compromised, make sure you're not using the same password on other websites or platforms.
   
   
6. Once you change your passwords and other personal details, you can archive  old breaches by pressing Archive.
   
   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:
   
   
   
7. Archived information from all breaches will fall into dedicated folders.
   
   
   The Breaches folder holds the history of your experienced breaches.
   
   The Passwords folder holds the history of your compromised passwords.
   
   The Personal information folder is for unspecified information, like ZIP codes, names, phone numbers, home addresses, usernames, etc.
   
   The IP addresses holds the history of the IPs that are associated with your email address and that have been breached.
   

Customize Surfshark Alert settings

1. Customize settings to fit your personal preferences by going to the Alert Settings panel.
   
   
   Breach report functionality will send you monthly, quarterly, or yearly summaries of all breaches that have happened during that time.
   
   
2. To enable the Status report, toggle the switch to the right, then choose how often you would like to receive these statistics.
   
   
   
3. In the Breach alerts section, you can choose which emails will receive Alert notifications. You can choose if you want all breach alerts to be sent to the primary email inbox or to each affected email individually.
   
   
   
4. You can also choose to remove all the data from your Alert account. This data will only be removed from your account, 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.

1. To add new emails, click the + sign at the top of the Alert dashboard. All new emails must be verified, so you will need to repeat the email verification process (refer to Activate Surfshark Alert section of this article).
   
   
2. Remove emails that you don't want to monitor anymore by clicking on the trash bin icon.

You may also be interested in:

1. How to monitor credit cards using Surfshark Alert

2. How to monitor national IDs using Surfshark Alert

3. How to enable 2FA for multiple users