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Did you use your email address as a username on other sites? That's cer-
tainly a common practice. But if you also used the same password that
you used for the hacked email account, those accounts are now compro-
mised as well.

Even if you didn't use the same password, you could still be in trouble.
Think about this. If you forget a website password, what do you do?
Right—you click to get a password reset link sent to your email address.
A smart hacker who has control of the email account will quickly seek
your other accounts, social media, perhaps, or worse, shopping and bank-
ing accounts.

After recovering from an email account takeover, you should visit every
site that's associated with that email address and change your password. A
password manager will be a great help here.

Won't Get Hacked Again!

How can you make sure you don't get hacked, or don't get hacked again?
Since the Equifax hack, you've probably seen numerous articles telling
you to freeze your credit, set up a fraud alert (meaning that you'll need to
go through extra verification steps to open a new account), and so forth.
Before making such modifications to your credit life, stop and consider
whether you're willing to make them permanent. After all, the next big
breach is just around the corner; in fact, it may have already happened.
The actual breach in the Equifax case happened months ago.

As far as credit cards go, there's not much you can do, other than avoid
shopping at shady retailers, real-world or online

Poorly-secured websites can expose your email address and password to
hackers, but using a bad password leaves your account wide open to a
simple brute-force attack. Use a strong password for your email account,
and a different strong password for every other account or secure site.
Yes, you'll need a password manager, but you don't have to pay. The best
free password managers are quite effective.