Have I Been Pwned

The conundrum I refer to in the title of this post is the one faced by a breached organisation: disclose or suppress? And let me be even more specific: should they disclose to impacted individuals, or simply never let them know? I'm writing this after many recent such discussions with breached organisations where I've found myself wishing I had this blog post to point them to, so, here it is. Let's start with tackling what is often a fundamental misunderstanding about disclosure obligations, an...

TL;DR — Tens of millions of credentials obtained from info stealer logs populated by malware were posted to Telegram channels last month and used to shake down companies for bug bounties under the misrepresentation the data originated from their service. How many attempted scams do you get each day? I woke up to yet another "redeem your points" SMS this morning, I'll probably receive a phone call from "my bank" today (edit: I was close, it was "Amazon Prime" 🤷‍♂️) and don't even get me started...

Last week, a security researcher sent me 122GB of data scraped out of thousands of Telegram channels. It contained 1.7k files with 2B lines and 361M unique email addresses of which 151M had never been seen in HIBP before. Alongside those addresses were passwords and, in many cases, the website the data pertains to. I've loaded it into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) today because there's a huge amount of previously unseen email addresses and based on all the checks I've done, it's legitimate data. That...

Today we loaded 16.5M email addresses and 13.5M unique passwords provided by law enforcement agencies into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) following botnet takedowns in a campaign they've coined Operation Endgame. That link provides an excellent overview so start there then come back to this blog post which adds some insight into the data and explains how HIBP fits into the picture. Since 2013 when I kicked off HIBP as a pet project, it has become an increasingly important part of the security posture...

We often do that in this industry, the whole "1.0" thing, but it seems apt here. I started Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) in 2013 as a pet project that scratched an itch, so I never really thought of myself as an "employee". Over time, it grew (and I tell you what, nobody is more surprised by that than me!) and over the last few years, my wife Charlotte got more and more involved. Technically, we're both employees and we work on HIBP things but we're like, well, beta versions. Today, I'm very happy t...

I hate having to use that word - "alleged" - because it's so inconclusive and I know it will leave people with many unanswered questions. (Edit: 12 days after publishing this blog post, it looks like the "alleged" caveat can be dropped, see the addition at the end of the post for more.) But sometimes, "alleged" is just where we need to begin and over the course of time, proper attribution is made and the dots are joined. We're here at "alleged" for two very simple reasons: one is that AT&T is sa...

I've always thought of it a bit like baseball cards; a kid has a card of this one player that another kid is keen on, and that kid has a card the first one wants so they make a trade. They both have a bunch of cards they've collected over time and by virtue of existing in the same social circles, trades are frequent, and cards flow back and forth on a regular basis. That's the analogy I often use to describe the data breach "personal stash" ecosystem, but with one key difference: if you trade a...

It feels like not a week goes by without someone sending me yet another credential stuffing list. It's usually something to the effect of "hey, have you seen the Spotify breach", to which I politely reply with a link to my old No, Spotify Wasn't Hacked blog post (it's just the output of a small set of credentials successfully tested against their service), and we all move on. Occasionally though, the corpus of data is of much greater significance, most notably the Collection #1 incident of early...

A decade ago to the day, I published a tweet launching what would surely become yet another pet project that scratched an itch, was kinda useful to a few people but other than that, would shortly fade away into the same obscurity as all the other ones I'd launched over the previous couple of decades: It's alive! "Have I been pwned?" by @troyhunt is now up and running. Search for your account across multiple breaches http://t.co/U0QyHZxP6k — Have I Been Pwned (@haveibeenpwned) December 4, 201...

Allegedly, Acuity had a data breach. That's the context that accompanied a massive trove of data that was sent to me 2 years ago now. I looked into it, tried to attribute and verify it then put it in the "too hard basket" and moved onto more pressing issues. It was only this week as I desperately tried to make some space to process yet more data that I realised why I was short on space in the first place: Ah, yeah - Acuity - that big blue 437GB blob. What follows is the process I went throu...