Request for feedback: Organisations using “Have I been pwned” data

Working on Have I been pwned (HIBP), I come across a lot of interesting things. Interesting people dealing in data breaches, interesting vulnerabilities in systems which have been compromised and interesting requests from people wanting the data. In fact, I was getting so many requests for data I ended up

Continue reading Request for feedback: Organisations using “Have I been pwned” data

Request for feedback: Organisations using “Have I been pwned” data

Working on Have I been pwned (HIBP), I come across a lot of interesting things. Interesting people dealing in data breaches, interesting vulnerabilities in systems which have been compromised and interesting requests from people wanting the data. In fact, I was getting so many requests for data I ended up writing No, I cannot share data breaches with you where I very explicitly laid out how I wouldn’t give people their own record from a breach, I wouldn’t give the data to researchers and I wouldn’t trade data breaches. I still hold that view – nothing has changed there – but I’ve been receiving some requests recently for access to data which is causing me to stop, think and, well, write this blog post seek your feedback. Let me explain.

HIBP is used in a number of different ways by large organisations. Some of them rely on the public API to check the exposure of their users and notify them, many have domain subscriptions which send them a notification if one of their colleagues is in a breach and a small number are using the commercial callback implementation to notify them when an account they’re monitoring is impacted. However, there are a few things stopping other orgs from using the service in any of these ways, things I can’t overcome with the current model.

The barriers I’m hearing from organisations who would like access to the data to do good things (I cannot emphasise that point enough) are two-fold; service location and privacy. On the former, these orgs are typically European and are beholden to local legislation which doesn’t like their data being sent outside the EU and subscribing emails to or querying HIBP would do just that. I could stand up an EU instance of the service, but it doesn’t solve the next issue which is privacy. These companies are understandably worried about sending me any of their data. They don’t want a situation regardless of where the service runs where I know who their customers are and I totally get that – I’d have the same concern.

So it leaves me in somewhat of a quandary; these organisations want to do good things with the data but my existing constructs make that impossible. Let me talk about the sorts of things they want to do though as that will put things in more perspective and I’ll start with an example. Someone sent me this from Amazon just the other day, have a read:

From: security-update@amazon.com
Subject: Your Amazon password has been changed
Date: March 16, 2016 at 4:02:41 PM CDT
To: [redacted]

Hello,

At Amazon we take your security and privacy very seriously. As part of our routine monitoring, we discovered a list of email address and password sets posted online. While the list was not Amazon-related, we know that many customers reuse their passwords on several websites. We believe your email address and password set was on that list. For your security, we have assigned a temporary password to your account.

You will need to reset your password when you return to the Amazon.com site. To reset your password, click "Your Account" at the top of any page on Amazon.com. On the Sign In page, click the "Forgot your password?" link to reach the Amazon.com Password Assistance page. After you enter your email or mobile phone number, you will receive an email containing a personalized link. Click the link from the email and follow the directions provided. 

Your new password will be effective immediately. We recommend that you choose a password that you have never used with any website.

Sincerely,

Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com

This is actually really cool – Amazon are sourcing data breaches then notifying their customers when they find a credential match. This isn’t entirely new, in fact I wrote about how both them and LinkedIn were doing it back in November. There are many fascinating things about this: Firstly, they’re actively acquiring data breaches, an activity that some have suggested is on the shady side of legal yet here we have some of the web’s largest properties doing it to do good things. Secondly, given that the vast majority of breaches have some form of cryptographic storage for passwords (even if it’s just plain old MD5), they’re either cracking hashes or hashing their customers’ passwords with the algorithm of the breached site when they log in (or register or change their password). It’s quite possibly the former as the individual who sent me the email above noted that it was an account he hadn’t used for years.

I can only see upsides to the likes of Amazon doing this. They’re decreasing the risk to the individual and they’re decreasing the likelihood of them having to deal with account takeovers by malicious parties. If they get onto this fast enough after a breach is found (and that’s always going to be the challenge), they have the ability to put a serious dent in the value of the data for those who wish to do harm.

All this brings me back to the requests I’ve been getting for access to HIBP data. These are coming from large names you’d recognise in various technology sectors and the common thread from these legitimate big players is that they genuinely want to improve the security of their existing customers. They want to do the same thing as Amazon and LinkedIn except they want the ability to consume that data “as a service”. But they don’t want the full data breach; they don’t want birth dates and genders and in a case like VTech, the names of people’s kids or for Ashley Madison, what your bedroom preferences are. They only want email addresses and passwords and in some cases, only just the email addresses.

I’ve thought of many different ways to do this without sending large volumes of data to the organisations keen on this approach. For example, I could have them send me a hash of the email they want to monitor and then hash each incoming email in a new breach and match based on those. In fact, this is already a suggestion in the HIBP User Voice but the problem is that I can still derive the original value of an address once I match it to one in a breach and they’re still “giving” me addresses which is against their rules. I’ve thought of just providing directions on where an org can obtain the breach from but not only is this not always possible (many are sent to me privately), there’d still be a bunch of processing work required on their behalf, work that I already do and they’d like to consume “as a service”.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I keep coming back to one key principle: could this help data breach victims? Would it reduce the number of accounts they’ve reused credentials across getting compromised and increase their awareness of the risks they face? It’s an emphatic “yes” and the remaining questions about whether this should happen or not are related to the downsides. Would this violate their privacy? That’s largely dependent on how the organisation I send this to handles it. Could it be done securely? Certainly we have mechanisms to transfer data in a highly secure fashion, it potentially wouldn’t even need to touch the Azure-based HIBP service (i.e. could be distributed directly from the environment in which the processing is done).

Here’s what I’d like from you: On balance, is this a good thing for data breach victims? Which organisations should have access to this data? What controls would you put in place? Is this something that would be valuable to your organisation? Anything else?

If you’ve been following HIBP for any period of time, you’ll know that I’m super cautious around issues of privacy and using the data for good. The last thing I’d ever want is to have all sorts of issues arise that I’d never even thought of. It’s not a small thing either – I’d have to make it a commercial offering – and there’d be a significant time commitment from me not just to build the mechanism but also each and every time I process a data breach. An agreement in place with a consuming organisation would also need to strictly outline how the data may be used, for example only to provide services that improves the security of their existing customers and not to elicit business from new ones. But I think it has the potential to do good things in the right organisations, such as what you see above with Amazon.

Leave your comments below folks or if you want to share anything privately, see the contact page. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Update: Have a read of Nzall’s comment about hashing. This sounds like a good model for reducing the risk of abuse as the customer would need to hash and compare each and every email on their end, they could never simply pull the entire list of addresses from the breach.

Continue reading Request for feedback: Organisations using “Have I been pwned” data

How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services

I get a lot of people popping up with data breaches for Have I been pwned (HIBP). There’s an interesting story in that itself actually, one I must get around to writing in the future as folks come from all sorts of different backgrounds and offer up data they’ve come across in various locations. Recently someone sent me a list of various data breaches they’d obtained, including this one:

InstantCheckmate 2015 – 80M entries

On the surface of it, that’s a phenomenal incident and it would be the second largest data breach ever loaded into HIBP. But it turned out to be something quite different and that in itself makes for an interesting story. Let me walk you through what was provided to me, the research I did and how I eventually joined together an entirely different set of dots.

Understanding the data

The data consisted of 396 files that looked like this:

Directory listing showing files in the data set

That’s just the first 27 of them in descending size. Just as an indication, here’s the first few rows of that largest file:

email,ip,url,joindate,fname,lname,address,address2,city,state,zip,phone,mobile,dob,gender
[redacted]@gmail.com,162.158.22.[redacted],instantcheckmate.com,2015-08-06,[redacted],[redacted],,,San Francisco,CA,94107,,,,
[redacted]@gmail.com,70.198.4.[redacted],creditcardguide.com,2015-08-06,,[redacted],,,Mitchell,SD,57301,,,,
[redacted]@gmail.com,166.137.139.[redacted],creditcardguide.com,2015-08-06,[redacted],[redacted],,,,,,,,,

In all, there are 81,191,621 records of similar structure across the nearly 400 files. Across these, there were a total of 30,741,620 unique email addresses. Aspects of this are very data breach-like: personal details spread across a large collection of files adhering to a common structure. Yet this was one of those ones which didn’t quite “smell right” and as I dug into the data, I began to realise I was looking at something quite different. Let me explain.

Verifying the “breach”

Usually when I’m verifying a data breach, the first thing I’ll do is check out the site it allegedly came from. In this case, that’s instantcheckmate.com:

The Instant Checkmate homepage

The whole point of the site appears to be to dig up information on people; prospective employees, a spouse and well, here’s some of the options they suggest based on their testimonials:

Testimonials about spying on neughbours and spouses

Spying on your neighbours or poking around your daughter’s private life are apparently also on the cards. Given that anybody can search for anybody else, I thought I’d see what I could find on my namesake in Texas:

Searching for Troy Hunt in Texas

It goes through a bunch of “checks” and shows the progress along the way:

A status bar indicating something is loading

As the green status bar progresses, data in the locations showing the loading indictors above gradually complete as though it’s being populated as queries are run. Only thing is though, all the requests the browser sends during this process are for… images. No APIs returning results or anything remotely related to actually finding information on the individual, it’s all just showmanship. By now, I was starting to think the whole thing might be a bit dodgy, but fortunately the site was then confirmed as legit courtesy of a Norton seal (in case the irony is lost on you, read Here’s why you can’t trust SSL logos on HTTP pages (even from SSL vendors) and then Exploring the Ecosystem of Third-party Security Seals):

A "Norton Secured" logo

I go through a number of different steps and the only request that actually transfers any data backwards and forwards is this one:

GET https://www.instantcheckmate.com/api/check-customer/
{"success":true,"error":null,"loggedIn":false}

Not exactly the sort of response that would indicate any of these checks actually being run. But then I got through to the crux of why I’d come to the site in the first place – data collection. I filled in the following personal details:

Filling in "my" details using john@mailinator.com

And this time, information was actually sent to the server. The API responded as follows:

{"success":false,"error":"Email already in use","lead":null,"emailInUse":true}

The significance here is that this is that by confirming that the email is already in use, the site exposes an enumeration risk or in other words, the server will happily tell you if an account exists on the site or not. This is the cornerstone of much of the verification process I go through every time I load a breach into HIBP. The “john” alias on Mailinator was simply made up and for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Mailinator is a free service that allows you to email any alias you’d like and then check it without any authentication or identity verification. For example, here’s John’s and it’s a neat service for what’s probably best described as “throwaway” accounts.

Getting to the point of all this, with an enumeration vector now discovered I could take one of the email addresses from the data I was provided and see if it exists on the site. For example, there’s stella@mailinator.com but… Instant Checkmate didn’t have it on record. Same with other examples – they didn’t exist on the site. I ran some other quick checks as well and I kept coming to the same conclusion – I couldn’t verify that the data had come from the site.

As shady as the site is (and there’s probably another story in there on just how misleading some of their practices are), I couldn’t attribute the “breach” back to them so I needed to look further.

Digging into the data

I wanted to get further clarity on the accuracy of the data because one thing I see a lot of is fabricated breaches. Because the data has both IP address and physical address, there was an avenue here I could pursue. For example, let’s take that first record above:

[redacted]@gmail.com,162.158.22.[redacted],instantcheckmate.com,2015-08-06,[redacted],[redacted],,,San Francisco,CA,94107,,,,

And now do a search on the IP address:

IP address is shown as being in San Fransisco

The IP address is located in San Francisco and so is the physical address on the record. I kept picking these at random and kept getting matches; the IP address was always a match to the location. My initial thought was that this likely indicated the person signing up to whatever service had leaked the data was entering their own physical address. In the case of Instant Checkmate, this might indicate that if the data had come from them, we’re looking at the info of the person doing the search, not the person they were searching for.

But the more I looked at the data the more…. good it looked. Too good – people don’t consistently enter the right city and postcode without typos or differences in case or other nuances that us fallible humans are so good at introducing. No, this was way more likely machine generated and given how well IPs were lining up with locations, it was very likely a case of someone on the other end taking the IP of the person who signed up and generating the physical location from it. Assuming that’s the case, it really told me very little about where the data had come from. I needed another angle and fortunately, I have a few hundred thousand of them on hand.

Verification with HIBP subscribers

As of the time of writing, I have 356k people subscribed to the free HIBP notification service and verified as wanting to be on there (they click a link in an email I send them). Every time there’s a paste or a breach loaded into the system, any single one of them who appears in it receives an email letting them know of their exposure. What this also means is that I’ve got a great list of people I can reach out to if I need help in verifying a data breach, something I’ve done on a number of occasions now when I’ve been unable to confirm the legitimacy of the incident.

I sent off a couple of dozen emails to the most recent subscribers asking for assistance and got a number of responses, including one from a girl in New Jersey. She offered assistance so I sent her over her record which was similar to the one above, but this time included the URL prepareyourcredit.com. She confirmed her name was correct but had this to say in terms of the location of the IP address:

A few blocks from a place I lived ~10 years ago.

And as for the URL:

Never heard of it, certainly didn’t sign up for it in 2015. My credit is fine so I wouldn’t even sign up for a similar service.

Which was interesting because it got me wondering how on earth she came to be associated with the site. She went on to say this:

I did sign up for my share of “earn money by taking online surveys” sites while in college, which is about the right timeframe for that data to have been sold/harvested.

As we went back and forwards discussing the data, the most likely explanation became that she had signed up to that site a decade ago and for some reason it had then been time-stamped last year and was now circulating around the web. Other responses from other people were consistent with the location being correct at some point in their lives, but them having no recollection of the site in the URL. This got me particularly interested in what was at the end of those URLs, so I did some digging…

Source URLs

I imported the entire data set into SQL Server to do some analysis. In there, I found over 900,000 unique values in the URL column. Some of them were due to data integrity issues in the source (i.e. inconsistent delimiters in some files), yet there were still 144 URLs with more than 50k records against them so obviously a large array of addresses.

Here’s the top 20 in terms of how many entries they had (note the double-up on the one that also represents the HTTP scheme):

URL Records
originalcruisegiveaway.com 6,315,233
www.directeducationcenter.com 4,483,469
creditcardguide.com 3,021,831
instantcheckmate.com 2,742,961
cash1234.biz 2,026,161
stimulationserotica.com 1,948,071
prepaidoptions.mobi 1,864,010
progressivebusinesssystems.com 1,812,917
thecouponcastle.com 1,791,022
employmentcalling.com 1,663,183
www.alwayscashloans.com 1,503,810
freerewardcenter.com 1,476,341
paydayloaneveryday.com 1,250,648
homepowerprofits.com 1,209,936
theonlinebusiness.com 1,102,612
http://www.homepowerprofits.com 1,083,029
pdlloans.com 987,104
employmentsearchusa.com 968,445
getamoneyadvance.com 964,620
luckylending.com 952,957

Just reading through these, you’ll notice a very common theme. Here’s what the other four in the top five look like (you’ve already seen Instant Checkmate):

Get a free cruise

 

Build on your knowledge to enhance your career

 

Your guide to finding the right credit card

 

Simple system to make money

It’s that same sort of sleazy marketing feel – “give us your info and we’ll give you something… maybe” – and it’s the sort of site that most of us end up on accidentally and then get out of ASAP. But “feel” is not enough to start drawing any conclusions on where the data had actually come from, I needed evidence.

I started by looking at the HTML source of the top sites and found, well, some patterns:

Same markup on three of the sites

Expecting to find privacy-enabled WHOIS records, I ran a domain search and instead, found this on each of the ones above:

WHOIS records showing the same owner

Now this is curious because we have identical ownership across sites designed to help you with your education, win a cruise and get yourself a credit card, not exactly complimentary business models.

I kept probing and found more matches:

Same markup on three other sites

Ok, firstly, tables. But secondly, these ones all had privacy enabled and all used the same name servers:

Privacy enabled domains using the same name servers

So here we have another set of sites almost certainly from the same organisation, albeit a different one from the first trilogy of sites I showed earlier. Now we’ve got a couple of employment sites and one about money advances which again, are not what you’d consider similar business models… unless the model is something altogether different…

Data harvesting services

Let’s go back to the largest of the sites in terms of the records provided in the dataset and that’s originalcruisegiveaway.com. Here’s how to “claim your spot” (but hurry!):

Entering personal info into the site

Once you enter your personal info (or fabricated info…) all you need to do is, wait…

A thank you screen with a guy carrying a girl down a beach

Assumedly, at some point you will end up carrying your bride away on a tropical island (or possibly being carried away by your man, depending on your perspective).

However, there’s a popular saying that if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product! It wouldn’t be a real solid business model to simply go giving away cruises to anyone who filled in the form, so there has to be another upside. Let’s try the privacy policy and in particular, this section (emphasis mine):

We may sell the personal information that you supply to us and we may work with other third party businesses to bring selected retail opportunities to our members via direct mail, email and telemarketing. These businesses may include providers of direct marketing services and applications, including lookup and reference, data enhancement, suppression and validation and email marketing. Regardless of any State or Federal Do Not Call Registrations, you the customer expressly consent to be contacted via telephone in reference to this offer.

But hang on – isn’t this your data they’re selling? Nope:

Once it is received in our database, any information, including your name, e-mail address, and home address becomes the property of Interactive Marketing Solutions.

This is outrageous! It’s America, so let’s just sue them. Oh wait, can’t do that either:

To the extent permitted by law, you agree that you will not bring, join or participate in any class action lawsuit as to any claim, dispute or controversy that you may have against the Company and/or its employees, officers, directors, members, representatives and/or assigns.

So in short, they own your data, they can resell it and there’s nothing you can do about it. But hey, at least you get a free cruise out of it, right?! Well, no. The web is littered with stories about free cruise scams and it’s entirely possible – no, likely – that this falls into the same category.

But that’s cruises, what about something like the education one? That data is also flying around the web, in fact it was being discussed in a forum on SEO tactics years ago:

Discovery of the education data

The original data is gone, but the site was archived:

Records of a similar structure on the Web Archive

The more I dug into these, the more all these sites conformed to similar patterns – “Hey, give us your details and you’ll get free stuff” – and the clearer it became where the data in the records I was handed was actually sourced from.

Now you may be thinking that this is just data that’s sold or traded in underground circles, away from the public eye and only obtainable by those who mix with this class of, well, “adversary”. But it’s much more public than that, let me explain.

Your data for sale

This brings us to the Special K Data Feed:

Special K Data Feed

Now normally I’d be a bit cautious about linking through to a resource like this but in this case, I feel that more exposure is better simply to illustrate the extent of the problem. There are screen caps of personal data – data I’ve elected to obfuscate here – but as you’ll also read, you need to take these with a grain of salt.

Apparently the data costs “1500$ compared to the 8,000$/month retail rate for it!” which is a little unclear in terms of what constitutes a month, although inevitably it’s a subset of the records handed to me. And why would someone want this data? For all sorts of good reasons:

Reasons to buy the data

This is data for sale – your data for sale – but of course you knew that because you agreed to your data being sold in the terms and conditions of the sites you gave it to, right?! The data here is a very close match to much of what I was given, in fact you can browse through the collection of files (although you can’t open them) and you’ll recognise many familiar filenames from my earlier screenshot.

As you browse back to the root of the site, you’ll find all sorts of data sets from different countries, including “foreign” countries like Australia:

Data from Australia and other countries

This data is sourced from all sorts of different locations:

5 Million records (w/phones, emails): Collected from several individuals/consumers in Australia, from verticals such as: Debt, Weight Loss, Cell Phone Sales/Accessories, and Sweepstakes/Giveaways!

Now I know what you’re thinking – you’d be blessed to have access to this sort of data and you’re absolutely right!

It’s very RARE, but BLESSED when there’s 5 Million records of this kind of data. Whether it’s for PHONES or EMAIL, you really get a nice PIECE that represents a NEW frontier for NEW PROFITS! Australia, the Island Nation worth swimming on shore for its outrageous outback barbequeing, kangaroos in the wild, and in some areas: a 12-to-1 female to male pop. ratio!

If you like the idea of being the one bloke surrounded by a dozen women while you BBQ your kangaroo (or something like that), take a look at the data they have for you (click for the full-sized image):

Sample Aussie data

This may look like personally identifiable info I’ve just shared but it’s not – it’s fake. The first sign of this is the very first name – “Sheila” – which just seemed way too convenient next to talk about kangaroos and BBQs. It’s frequently a tongue-in-cheek name for Aussie women and whilst indeed there are a number of legitimate Sheilas out there (named Sheila), this was just a bit too coincidental.

What’s not possible is to have all of these people in Western Australia yet have post codes which start with a 4:

Australian postcode ranges by state (WA starts with "6")

They’re all Queensland post codes in the sample data, yet they all sit next to phone numbers beginning with 03 which is only used in Victoria and Tasmania:

Aussie telephone area codes

So that’s half the country’s states represented right there in the “sample” data. Let’s try Sheila’s IP address:

Sheila's IP address is in China

If you’re looking for kangaroos to BBQ there, you’re going to be greatly disappointed!

The bottom line is that there’s a bunch of fake data being sold. Initially I looked at this and was concerned to see names like Kogan there in the source of the data (they’re a legitimate company), but clearly it’s all fabricated anyway. I wondered if it was perhaps merely representative of the sort of data you could expect from the 5 million records, but there’s nothing on the site to explicitly suggest that.

The thing is though, other data isn’t fabricated because I’ve verified it with HIBP subscribers. Now that may well have come from a different source and the D4M site is merely reselling it as one of many online distribution channels, but the fact remains that in those 30M+ records there is legitimate personal data.

Conclusions

When I started looking at the data I was sent, I expected to end up with an additional 30 million records in HIBP. That’s not going to happen because this isn’t a data breach therefore I won’t be loading it, but what the exercise did do is open my eyes further in terms of understanding how personal data is collected and redistributed.

Aspects of this story remain unanswered for me; do the sites I discuss above have business models beyond just data harvesting? Instant Checkmate certainly wants to charge for reports, was it a conscious decision to sell the data in the collection sent to me and indeed did it even come from them in the first place? As for the other giveaway sites, are they simply on the shady side of the web running misleading campaigns or is it their express intention to collect and then resell the data? If anyone has any insights on this or would just like to speculate, please do leave a comment below.

Your data is actually quite valuable and I don’t just mean your sensitive personal info such as your birth date or your income level or the things we would normally associate with being worth something to nefarious parties. Your name and your location combined with your email address is valuable too, perhaps not in isolation but in large collections numbering in the millions, they’re actually worth a bit and they can be sold over and over again. The actual impact of this on you may be minimal (namely spam), but most people aren’t real keen on their data being traded in this way.

Your data is a commodity and as such, others will attempt to extract it from you and sell it. Remember this the next time a site like the ones above request it from you; how are they justifying their online presence? Are you the product? Probably.

Continue reading How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services

How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services

I get a lot of people popping up with data breaches for Have I been pwned (HIBP). There’s an interesting story in that itself actually, one I must get around to writing in the future as folks come from all sorts of different backgrounds and offer up data

Continue reading How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services

Breaches, “Have I been pwned?”, password reuse, 1Password and good deeds

I spend a lot of time on Have I been pwned (HIBP) which consists of both maintaining and building out the software with new features as well as obviously sourcing new data for it on a regular basis. I make it freely available to the community and some time ago at the suggestion of some of those who’d found it useful, I stood up a donations page. Whilst the service is cheap to run courtesy of Azure being pretty cost efficient, it’s the time commitment that really bites so that’s what I focused on. Donations consist of things like a cup of coffee or a beer or things that allow me to spend time with my family. I get donations in ebbs and flows (i.e. there’s always more after a big data breach when heaps of people get notified), and occasionally, I get a really nice message along with it, a message such as this one:

This is awesome – just got a donation for @haveibeenpwned and they made this paste: https://t.co/JvAh2pd9jF

Messages like this make my day!

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) February 24, 2016

Let me share the contents of that paste here:

I don't have a lot of spare money, but because of your site, I can keep what I have. I was just caught in the Linux Mint breach (as well as a few others I didn't know about) where my password is easily recoverable from the data. The same email and password (I know this is a terrible idea) used on my PayPal account.
 
I'm sure that's a common story, but I just wanted to share the impact that this service is having. I'm a web developer, I know how hard it can be to keep something like this running, and I can't imagine the stress of knowing that people rely on you to let them know if their info is out there, so thank you.

More than the donation itself, what I really love about this is hearing firsthand how HIBP has made a positive impact on someone. Breaches like Linux Mint are actively sold and traded and the contents within them is frequently used to exploit the innocent victims of the incident. I’ve written about these practices in the past and I’ve also written about how HIBP has been able to help erode the value of data breaches and I’m enormously glad to see it having a positive impact in all these ways.

Anyway, a Twitter follower came up with a suggestion for the bloke who left me the message:

@troyhunt @haveibeenpwned gift the guy a copy of 1pwd 🙂

— Dave O’Flynn (@daveoflynn) February 24, 2016

I thought that was a great idea and whilst I don’t have the power to give him freebies myself (I’ve paid full retail for every version of 1Password I’ve ever owned), I do know nice people over there, people nice enough to do this for him:

@troyhunt @daveoflynn @haveibeenpwned @1Password Send him our way! We’ll see what we can do

— Jessy Irwin (@jessysaurusrex) February 24, 2016

And that is all – he now has a great password manager! Just a good news story all round; I was very happy to see a positive difference made in a couple of little ways that just may have saved him from much bigger problems.

Continue reading Breaches, “Have I been pwned?”, password reuse, 1Password and good deeds

Breaches, “Have I been pwned?”, password reuse, 1Password and good deeds

I spend a lot of time on Have I been pwned (HIBP) which consists of both maintaining and building out the software with new features as well as obviously sourcing new data for it on a regular basis. I make it freely available to the community and some time ago

Continue reading Breaches, “Have I been pwned?”, password reuse, 1Password and good deeds