Category: Have I Been Pwned

The sheer scope of cybercrime can be hard to fathom, even when you live and breathe it every day. It’s not just the volume of data, but also the extent to which it replicates across criminal actors seeking to abuse it for their own gain, and to our detriment. We were reminded of this recently…

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Normally, when someone sends feedback like this, I ignore it, but it happens often enough that it deserves an explainer, because the answer is really, really simple. So simple, in fact, that it should be evident to the likes of Bruce, who decided his misunderstanding deserved a 1-star Trustpilot review yesterday: Now, frankly, Trustpilot is…

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I hate hyperbolic news headlines about data breaches, but for the “2 Billion Email Addresses” headline to be hyperbolic, it’d need to be exaggerated or overstated – and it isn’t. It’s rounded up from the more precise number of 1,957,476,021 unique email addresses, but other than that, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Oh –…

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Where is your data on the internet? I mean, outside the places you’ve consciously provided it, where has it now flowed to and is being used and abused in ways you’ve never expected? The truth is that once the bad guys have your data, it often replicates over and over again via numerous channels and…

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You see it all the time after a tragedy occurs somewhere, and people flock to offer their sympathies via the “thoughts and prayers” line. Sympathy is great, and we should all express that sentiment appropriately. The criticism, however, is that the line is often offered as a substitute for meaningful action. Responding to an incident…

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One of the most common use cases for HIBP’s API is querying by email address, and we support hundreds of millions of searches against this endpoint every month. Loads of organisations use this service to understand the exposure of their customers and provide them with better protection against account takeover attacks. Many also use it…

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Well, one of them is, but what’s important is that we now have a platform on which we can start pushing out a lot more. It’s not that HIBP is a particularly complex system that needs explaining in any depth, but we still get a lot of “how do I…” style questions for the fundamentals.…

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We were recently travelling to faraway lands, doing meet and greets with gov partners, when one of them posed an interesting idea: What if people from our part of the world could see a link through to our local resource on data breaches provided by the gov? Initially, I was sceptical, primarily because no matter…

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I’m often asked if cyber criminals are getting better at impersonating legitimate organisations in order to sneak their phishing attacks through. Yes, they absolutely are, but I also argue that the inverse is true too: legitimate organisations frequently communicate in ways that are indistinguishable from a phishing attack! I can name countless examples of banks,…

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If I’m honest, I was never that keen on a merch store for Have I Been Pwned. It doesn’t make the code run faster, nor does it load any more data breaches or add any useful features to the service whatsoever. But… people were keen. They wanted swag they could wear or drink from or…

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One of the greatest fears we all have in the wake of a data breach is having our identity stolen. Nefarious parties gather our personal information exposed in the breach, approach financial institutions and then impersonate us to do stuff like this: So I recently somewhat had my identity stolen, someone used my driver’s license…

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I always used to joke that when people used Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), we effectively said “Oh no – you’ve been pwned! Uh, good luck!” and left it at that. That was fine when it was a pet project used by people who live in a similar world to me, but it didn’t do…

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This has been a very long time coming, but finally, after a marathon effort, the brand new Have I Been Pwned website is now live! Feb last year is when I made the first commit to the public repo for the rebranded service, and we soft-launched the new brand in March of this year. Over…

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For many years, people would come to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), run a search on their email address, get the big red “Oh no – pwned!” response and then… I’m not sure. We really didn’t have much guidance until we partnered with 1Password and started giving specific advice about how to secure your digital…

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Designing the first logo for Have I Been Pwned was easy: I took a SQL injection pattern, wrote “have i been pwned?” after it and then, just to give it a touch of class, put a rectangle with rounded corners around it: Job done! I mean really, what more did I need for a pet…

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I think I’ve finally caught my breath after dealing with those 23 billion rows of stealer logs last week. That was a bit intense, as is usually the way after any large incident goes into HIBP. But the confusing nature of stealer logs coupled with an overtly long blog post explaining them and the conflation…

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TL;DR — Email addresses in stealer logs can now be queried in HIBP to discover which websites they’ve had credentials exposed against. Individuals can see this by verifying their address using the notification service and organisations monitoring domains can pull a list back via a new API. Nasty stuff, stealer logs. I’ve written about them and…

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Nearly four years ago now, I set out to write a book with Charlotte and RobIt was the stories behind the stories, the things that drove me to write my most important blog posts, and then the things that happened afterwards. It’s almost like a collection of meta posts, each one adding behind-the-scenes commentary that…

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