Have I Been Pwned

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...

Edit (1 day later): After posting this, the party responsible for leaking the data turned around and said "that was only a small part of it, here's the whole thing", and released records encompassing a further 14M records. I've added those into HIBP and will shortly be re-sending notifications to people monitoring domains as the count of impacted addresses will likely have changed. Everything else about the subsequent dataset is consistent with what you'll read below in terms of structure, patte...

Last week I was contacted by CERT Poland. They'd observed a phishing campaign that had collected 68k credentials from unsuspecting victims and asked if HIBP may be used to help alert these individuals to their exposure. The campaign began with a typical email requesting more information: In this case, the email contained a fake purchase order attachment which requested login credentials that were then posted back to infrastructure controlled by the attacker: All in all, CERT Poland identified...

Today, the US Justice Department announced a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom to disrupt the botnet and malware known as Qakbot and take down its infrastructure. Beyond just taking down the backbone of the operation, the FBI began actively intercepting traffic from the botnet and instructing infected machines the uninstall the malware: To disrupt the botnet, the FBI was able to redirect Qakbot botnet traffic...

There's a "hidden" API on HIBP. Well, it's not "hidden" insofar as it's easily discoverable if you watch the network traffic from the client, but it's not meant to be called directly, rather only via the web app. It's called "unified search" and it looks just like this: It's been there in one form or another since day 1 (so almost a decade now), and it serves a sole purpose: to perform searches from the home page. That is all - only from the home page. It's called asynchronously from the client...

I've been teaching my 13-year old son Ari how to code since I first got him started on Scratch many years ago, and gradually progressed through to the current day where he's getting into Python in Visual Studio Code. As I was writing the new domain search API for Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) over the course of this year, I was trying to explain to him how powerful APIs are: Think of HIBP as one website that does pretty much one thing; you load it in your browser and search through data breaches whi...

This is a big one. A massive one. It's the culmination of a solid 7 months of work that finally, as of now, is live. The full back story is in my blog post from mid-June about The Big 5 Announcements but to save you trawling through all of that, here are the cliff notes: 1. Domain searches in HIBP are resource intensive and the impact was becoming increasingly obvious 2. More than half the Fortune 500 are using this feature, along with a who's who of big brands 3. We decided to introduce pri...

There are presently 201k people monitoring domains in Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). That's massive! That's 201k people that have searched for a domain, left their email address for future notifications when the domain appears in a new breach and successfully verified that they control the domain. But that's only a subset of all the domains searched, which totals 231k. In many instances, multiple people have searched for the same domain (most likely from the same company given they've successfully ve...

A quick summary first before the details: This week, the FBI in cooperation with international law enforcement partners took down a notorious marketplace trading in stolen identity data in an effort they've named "Operation Cookie Monster". They've provided millions of impacted email addresses and passwords to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) so that victims of the incident can discover if they have been exposed. This breach has been flagged as "sensitive" which means it is not publicly searchable,...