Have I Been Pwned

Current status: The competition has run and been won! Scroll down to the bottom for the result. Friends who follow what I'm up to these days will see that I'm often away from home in far-flung parts of the world. What that means is a lot of time on planes, a lot of time in airports (which is where I'm writing this now) and a lot of time in hotel rooms. Want to know how I churn out so much content? It's using that otherwise wasted down time to do useful things. But to do that, I need to be produ...

No matter how much anyone tries to sugar coat it, a service like Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) which deals with billions of records hacked out of other peoples' systems is always going to sit in a grey area. There are degrees, of course; at one end of the spectrum you have the likes of Microsoft and Amazon using data breaches to better protect their customers' accounts [https://www.troyhunt.com/random-thoughts-on-the-use-of-breach-data/]. At the other end, there's servi...

Last week I was contacted by someone alerting me to the presence of a spam list. A big one. That's a bit of a relative term though because whilst I've loaded "big" spam lists into Have I been pwned (HIBP) before [https://www.troyhunt.com/have-i-been-pwned-and-spam-lists-of-personal-information/], the largest to date has been a mere 393m records and belonged to River City Media [https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#RiverCityMedia]. The one I'm writing about today is 711m records which makes i...

Edit 1: The following day, I loaded another set of passwords which has brought this up to 320M. More on why later on. Edit 2: The API model described below has subsequently been discontinued [https://www.troyhunt.com/enhancing-pwned-passwords-privacy-by-exclusively-supporting-anonymity/] in favour of the k-anonymity model [https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/] launched with V2. Last week I wrote about Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern E...

Over the weekend, a Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) subscriber contacted me after they found their Spotify credentials online. It turns out that this particular woman went searching for her specific password after finding "some guy listening to Mexican music from a foreign device on my acct". In the search results, she found a site hosted on Google's Blogger service with troves and troves of Spotify credentials, among others. Now I've seen a lot of lists of "hacked Spotify...

Over the last few days, I've loaded more than 1 billion new records into Have I been pwned(HIBP) [https://www.troyhunt.com/password-reuse-credential-stuffing-and-another-1-billion-records-in-have-i-been-pwned/] . As I describe in that blog post, this data was from two very large "combo lists", that is email address and password pairs created by malicious parties in order to help them break into other accounts reusing those credentials. In all, I sent about 440k email notifications and saw hundre...

The short version: I'm loading over 1 billion breached accounts into HIBP. These are from 2 different "combo lists", collections of email addresses and passwords from all sorts of different locations. I've verified their accuracy (including my own record in one of them) and many hundreds of millions of the email addresses are not already in HIBP. Because of the nature of the data coming from different places, if you're in there then treat it as a reminder that your data is out there circulating...

A few years back, I added a donations page to Have I been pwned (HIBP) [https://haveibeenpwned.com/Donate]. Now as I explained at the time, I didn't particularly need them to cover my hard-cash outgoings because I run the thing on a shoestring, but as I explain on that page, it takes a massive amount of effort. If people want to fling me a coffee or some beers, that's just great and I appreciate it enormously. Problem is, it's hard to individually show that appreciation. Especially during a busy...

Someone sent me an email today which essentially boiled down to this: > Hey, Microsoft's Azure Active Directory alerted me to leaked credentials but won't give me any details so there's very little I can do about it This is a really interesting scenario and it relates to the way Microsoft reports risk events [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-reporting-risk-events#leaked-credentials] , one of which is the discovery of leaked credentials that match those...

There's a seemingly endless flood of data breaches these days. Pretty much every day I get sent dumps from somewhere or other, usually websites I've never heard of and often dating back to compromises from years ago. They vary in size from thousands of accounts to many millions - and this is just the ones I've looked at. In short, there's way more data than I have time to process. Occasionally though, an incident floats to the top of the others which is what's happened over the last few days. T...