Two billion email addresses were exposed

https://www.troyhunt.com/2-billion-email-addresses-were-exposed-and-we-indexed-them-all-in-have-i-been-pwned/

by esnard • 9 months ago

634 418 9 months ago

gausswho• 9 months ago

Amidst all of these pwnings, we still don't have a standard way to update our passwords from our password managers automatically.

throawayonthe• 9 months ago

if we could have standardization like that, we wouldn't need passwords

phoronixrly• 9 months ago

We also wouldn't be having an issue with password leaks as I expect it would be simpler to move on to passkeys (or something else) than implementing a standard way of password rotation...

bl4ck1e• 9 months ago

If there was a standard, do you know how long it would take to get adopted across the interwebs.

DANmode• 9 months ago

10 years.

goalieca• 9 months ago

I feel like we missed the chance to have a standard http resource for this stuff.

berkes2• 9 months ago

yes!

It's a shame, IMO, that the Basic Auth never got updated or superceded by something with a better UX and with modern security.

mbesto• 9 months ago

Passkeys essentially solve this, however they are not backwards compatible. If they were backwards compatible (e.g. an automated way to change passwords) then you might as well just enable Passkey as a replacement. Thats the conundrum.

worldfoodgood8• 9 months ago

The downside to having many vanity urls and giving out a unique email address to each website you visit is that you cannot use haveibeenpwned without paying (despite being a single human). I have no idea how many email addresses I've given out over the years, probably hundreds across at least 6 or 7 domains, and they want to charge me a monthly fee to see which of those have been pwned.

I understand they gotta make a buck, but I find it interesting this is the first real negative to running a unique email address per company/site I work with.

SoftTalker• 9 months ago

Just assume they have all been exposed.

Email addresses are not secrets under any stretch of the meaning of that word.

worldfoodgood8• 9 months ago

It's not the email address itself that I care about, and that's not the service that the site provides. It tells you for which email addresses a related password has been pwned.

EvanAnderson6• 9 months ago

I'm in the same boat. I track all of the unique addresses I use (via my password manager) so I guess I could just check them all against HiBP's database. Kind of a pain in the ass, though.

warkdarrior• 9 months ago

My password manager (Bitwarden) does that automatically.

Beijinger• 9 months ago

enpass.io does this automatically if you selected the option.

mindslight• 9 months ago

Me too. It used to work for whole domains. Then I guess the limit was added as part of some kind of monetization push. I don't derive enough value to pay for a monthly subscription any time it occurs to me to check, nor figure out how to check addresses one-by-one programatically. So the site is basically dead to me now. It's a shame because there were a few breached lists where people were speculating on where exactly they came from, and I was able to add to the discussion based on which of my tagged addresses were in the list.

huijzer• 9 months ago

Isn’t the idea that you don’t need haveibeenpowned since you’ll see mails coming in and then know your details have leaked?

For ID fraud, more than an email address has to be leaked.

worldfoodgood8• 9 months ago

Have I been pwned will tell me if the associated password for that site leaked. I create unique passwords per site, but lets say my mastercard login gets pwned -- that'd be one I want to change the password for right away.

I might not get an email if someone gets that account info.

kccqzy3• 9 months ago

The domain search feature on haveibeenpwned is/was free. I registered my domain on haveibeenpwned back in 2017 and I got two emails about breaches, one in 2020 and another in 2022. I did not pay.

EvanAnderson6• 9 months ago

It tells you that an address in your domain has been included in a breach. It doesn't tell you which address was included. That's what the OP and I are opining about.

username44• 9 months ago

I wasn’t aware of this feature, but can confirm. Just tried and it is free.

Log into dashboard, under business there is a domains tab. Enter your domain there and verify ownership. Didn’t ask for payment.

worldfoodgood8• 9 months ago

It is only free if you have fewer than 10 pwned addresses.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 9 months ago

I don't understand... The password is the secret, right? If your mastercard login ends up in some breach, your password is protecting. You without or without vanish urls, if you have strong passwords you'll be fine.

XorNot2• 9 months ago

Cybercrime has a logistics pipeline.

Harvesting potential targets is one part of it i.e. establishing someone was using an email address is the entry point. There's a lot of emails, so associating them to any particular website is right near the start. Establishing that they're active increases their value further.

The people responding to Troy here for example are technically doing that: they clearly monitor the email or still use it, so addresses which respond to up in value.

guelo• 9 months ago

I have the more typical one email used with hundreds of passwords on many websites. haveibeenpwned is also useless for me, it will tell me that my email was compromised but not which sites or passwords. I guess I could check each password individually, hope each password is globally unique to me, and then try to match it back to the website where I used it so I can change the password.

NetMageSCW7• 9 months ago

If you don’t know which web site uses a particular password, how do you ever login to that website?

TZubiri5• 9 months ago

You need a domain, and possibly a paid mail provider with catch all support.

So cost was always part of this strategy

worldfoodgood8• 9 months ago

I have those things? Did you miss the part where I have multiple vanity URLs and hundreds of email addresses? Of course I have a paid mail provider and catch all. The problem is the cost of haveibeenpwned is too much for me as an individual.

ycuser22• 9 months ago

The problem with catch-all inbox is when you have to reply to an email. Then you have to create the email address to be able to send emails from it. Or are there other solutions?

joshka• 9 months ago

Troy's response [1] on this use case from a couple of years ago was that you should buy a monthly fee and then cancel it.

[1] https://www.troyhunt.com/welcome-to-the-new-have-i-been-pwne...

joe5150• 9 months ago

It's honestly very hard to even care at that scale.

imgabe• 9 months ago

My data was exposed in one of the Facebook leaks and it turned out I had an old email on my Facebook account with a domain I had since let lapse and abandoned. Someone else registered the domain and tried to take over my Facebook account by sending a password reset request using it. Luckily I had 2FA and I guess Facebook's fraud alerts picked it up so It wasn't successful.

I guess what I want to say is beware that even something as innocuous as an email being leaked can cause problems, and make sure you delete any unused addresses from your accounts!

esafak• 9 months ago

What a lot of work to capture one account.

twodave• 9 months ago

I can think of a lot of ways that would be worth it.

* blackmail the account owner

* make up an illness, create a donation page and get all their friends to donate

* find all connections over a certain age and disguise a phishing vector as literally anything!

* so many more

guywithahat• 9 months ago

Which is incredible because it means they paid to get the domain and try to access that account. I can't imagine why anyone would care that much about your Facebook (assuming you're not someone who's especially influential) and yet here we are

giobox2• 9 months ago

One of the drawbacks of using a custom domain for personal email is you essentially have to pay for it for life, otherwise anyone can just buy your old email address if the domain expires and start receiving mail, resetting accounts... I think some folks don't fully consider this consequence when setting up a fun vanity email address or similar etc, especially now both iCloud and gmail have made it so trivial to link a custom domain.

hn_acc12• 9 months ago

Conversely, if yahoo/google ever stop offering free email, I'll probably end up paying them much higher prices to keep going for a bit until I can transition.

If either ever stop period, especially one day to the next, FML...

digisign• 9 months ago

Accounts can most often be closed or deleted permanently when one wants to stop or move. Some can change your address.

zwnow2• 9 months ago

Can anyone enlighten me why an exposed email address is an issue? I get it if its some kinda admin@foo.com but my private mail, why would I care? Its not like they have my password?

dylan604• 9 months ago

Until they figure out the password to that email and then take over everything else in your life. They are not collecting email address because they are useless.

worldfoodgood8• 9 months ago

Oh - and 1.3 billion unique passwords, 625 million of which we'd never seen before either.

It's not just email addresses. It's address + password combos.

But also, how did 2 billion email addresses get exposed? Assuming I give an email address to a company (and only that company) if someone gets access to that email addresss they either got it from me or that company. Knowing the company has sold, lost, or poorly protected my email address tells me they are maybe not worth working with in the future.

zwnow2• 9 months ago

Yea a combo is more problemtic, I could see why thats an issue. Most important stuff in my life has 2FA with my phone thankfully. My banking password got breached like 3 years ago and i still didnt change it... nothing ever happened. I am guessing tech companies that could have huge negative influence on your life should have additional security measures in place, like not allowing a login from a different country unless some kinda mobile code is provided or stuff like that. I'm pretty naive with all that tbh.

buzer• 9 months ago

But also, how did 2 billion email addresses get exposed?

The list contains emails which have been part of some other breaches. In my domain I have 2 emails that were exposed that weren't my normal email address. One of them was a typo that I used sign up for one service which was later breached. The other one was something someone used to register to service that I have never used & that service was later breached. Those emails have never been used for anything else as far as I'm aware.

Of course judging from what posted there are likely some other services as well which were breached but wasn't noticed/published until now.

santiagobasulto• 9 months ago

Could leave to massive impersonation attempts. All the folks here on HN are probably very tech savvy, so we’ll likely have a strong password + 2FA. But mom and pops that just got their email addresses leaked? Probably not. So they might start just trying out a rainbow table of common passwords and getting access to peoples emails. Once you’re there getting to home banking and other privileged resources is not hard.

295fge• 9 months ago

Troy Hunt’s brand is to exaggerate secret risk.

elorant• 9 months ago

One reason is spam. The other is that in many cases passwords are leaked too.

ddxv• 9 months ago

Yeah, I agree. I consider them like public keys or IPs.

clickety_clack• 9 months ago

It’s not the email address itself that’s important, it’s that the email address is a key identifying users in data breaches. The email addresses are presumably linked to breaches of pii or passwords etc.

zkmon• 9 months ago

I think we should stop seeing email address as a secret or something that can be "stolen". Password? who is still storing passwords on their servers, instead of a hash?

gretch• 9 months ago

Given enough time, hashes are reversible via brute force.

If the attacker steals the entire password table undetected, they have a large amount of time to generate soft collisions. After all they don’t need to hack any particular account, just some 50% of the accounts.

The time can be increased by some coefficient via salting, but the principles remain the same.

MattSteelblade• 9 months ago

For password hashing, only short-output or broken hash functions have practical collision concerns. The odds of any random collision with a 256-bit hash, and not with a specific hash, is 50% at 2^128 inputs. Salting is a defense against precomputation attacks like rainbow tables and masking password reuse. Attackers crack password dumps by trying known password combinations, previously compromised passwords, brute force up to a certain length, etc. and using the hashing algorithm to compare the output.

berkes2• 9 months ago

A lot of companies and services are storing unsalted hashes of passwords. Which is not much better than storing plain-text passwords.

It's becoming less and even languages with a "strong legacy body" like PHP have sane defaults nowadays, but I do see them around when I do consultancy or security reports.

"Never fix something that aint broken" also means that after several years or a decade or more, your "back then best security practices" are now rediculously outdated and insecure. That Drupal setup from 2011 at apiv1docs.example.com could very well have unsalted hashes now. The PoC KPI dashboard that long gone freelancer built in flask 8 years ago? probably unsalted hashes. And so on.

elric2• 9 months ago

It's not about the email addresses themselves. Those are just the identifier by which things can be discovered on haveibeenpwnd. The point is that when email addresses rae stolen/leaked, they're usually accompanied by passwords, addresses, CC information etc.

In some cases the email address combined with the name of that site that leaked it can be enough to get people in trouble. E.g. "niche" dating sites.

hirvi74• 9 months ago

I have really started to use the 'Hide my email' feature from iCloud. It's been so nice. If an email gets pwned, which often happens from a service I stopped using many moons ago, then I just deactivate or delete the email address. I imagine many other services provide this feature as well, but it's what's most convenient for me at this time.

rkagerer3• 9 months ago

Can anyone recommend a good third party service that provides similar functionality and a great user experience?

For those of us who don't want to entrust this to Apple and who'd like to use our own domain?

hylaride• 9 months ago

There are several options to choose from, but most data brokers will know that small custom domains go back to a certain or small group of people.

That being said, this is a good list:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/108wzvg/what_is_th...

Not sure I trust the longevity of some of them, though. I do use https://temp-mail.org/en/ or other similar services for some logins for some services I'm not afraid to lose access to, though (especially for places likely to spam me).

sdfhbdf• 9 months ago

addy.io

jlund-molfese• 9 months ago

Post should've been titled "1.3 billion passwords were exposed", because, even though the number is slightly smaller, it actually represents something much more important.

layer84• 9 months ago

The number of passwords is probably smaller. ;)

bobmcnamara3• 9 months ago

~1.3e9 passwords, ~1.9e9 (account, password) tuples, if I understood

naet• 9 months ago

There have been enough data breaches at this point that I'm sure all my info has been exposed multiple times (addresses, SSN, telephone number, email, etc). My email is in over a dozen breaches listed on the been pwned site. I've gotten legal letters about breaches from colleges I applied to, job boards I used, and other places that definitely have a good amount of my past personal information. And that's not even counting the "legal" big data /analytics collected from past social media, Internet browsing, and whatever else.

I now use strong passwords stored in bitwarden to try to at least keep on top of that one piece. I'm sure there are unfortunately random old accounts on services I don't use anymore with compromised passwords out there.

Not really sure what if anything can be done at this point. I wish my info wasn't out there but it is.

kccqzy3• 9 months ago

Addresses? Most of the time addresses are a matter of public record. I have used https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ a couple of times to search for people's addresses and it really works. One day a close friend excitedly told me she bought a new house and I told her the address before she told me about it.

Telephone number? There used to be phone books. And I still instinctively think they should be public.

animex• 9 months ago

I think the headline is a bit vague, it includes passwords as well. Does anyone know if Troy's HIBP'd site reveals the passwords to verified users? I'd like to know if my current or what generation of passwords has been breached to evaluate if I have a current or past problem with my devices.

lotsofpulp• 9 months ago

Addresses can lead you to public land and mortgage records, and phone numbers can lead you to names and addressed. I assume everyone can easily find that out about me once they know my name/phone number.

Cthulhu_• 9 months ago

An address can be dangerous if it's e.g. a social network site or blog, anywhere where you post under an alias. People make enemies, have stalkers, or say things online that certain regimes don't like. Granted, this is only really a thing for a minority, but if a minority isn't safe, nobody is.

coleca• 9 months ago

I was thinking the same thing. Can you imagine the headline?

"Forget Hackers! Phone Company Delivers Your Private Info—Including Your Home Address—Directly to Strangers!"

skinkestek• 9 months ago

Telephone number? There used to be phone books. And I still instinctively think they should be public.

I used to think the same. Around here I feel until a few years ago most people I knew with secret phones were people I would prefer to have fewer interactions with: people who frequently got into trouble, tried to scam others etc.

These days I’m more in the camp of layered security. Whatever I can do to make it harder for an attacker, the better.

I have used https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ a couple of times to search for people's addresses and it really works.

Tangential:

Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access fastpeoplesearch.com

(Safari on a stock iPhone, mobile broadband from the biggest and most well known telecom company in my country, ipv6 address.)

kulahan3• 9 months ago

I was in the military. China stole my freaking DNA profile. I've given up on worrying about this stuff.

rdl• 9 months ago

Even better "please give us all the things which could be used by a foreign power to blackmail you, or apply pressure to relatives or other close contacts" and then poorly secure that database.

harvey9• 9 months ago

Gonna be a very weird day for you when China's clone army invades us.

WaitWaitWha• 9 months ago

The number of years I got "free credit monitoring" I can pass it down to my children . . .

enjaydee2• 9 months ago

Wow! Didn't hear about this. What test did you get done? I'm hoping it wasn't whole genome or exome?

esseph3• 9 months ago

DNA, blood type, fingerprints, and anything else on your background checks...

They even got my kids social security numbers.

ifwinterco• 9 months ago

DNA is actually almost impossible to keep secret if someone really wants it - you basically shed your entire DNA every time you touch anything

InitialBP• 9 months ago

That is awful, but it doesn't lessen the impact of someone who right now has access to your email and or other accounts. China having your DNA profile is not near as impactful as someone actively stealing your identity and potentially ruining your finances. Use 2fa everywhere, and if your email is in this list, you should change your password.

eyeundersand• 9 months ago

+1 for Bitwarden. It is literally the best solution out there. Been getting to increase uptake in personal circles with (very) limited success. The wife keeps trying to convince me that the ship has sailed in trying to protect info online. She's probably right.

stronglikedan• 9 months ago

Bitwarden

Best when paid for so you can do 2FA with TOTP codes!

Xerox9213• 9 months ago

I convinced my wife to start using a password manager, too (Bitwarden). Now she stores all of her very guessable, short, similar passwords in a manager. Sigh.

NewsaHackO• 9 months ago

I use a similar service, I always wonder what sort of risk having one point of failure has though. I know 2FA helps, but a particularly motivated person with access to you physical still may be able to get both, espically if it for an investigation of some sort.

teekert• 9 months ago

I switched from Bitwarden to Proton pass (because we got Proton family) and I find to be equally good. Ineven find sharing credentials a bit easier as it does not require organizations, you can just share with individuals.

Proton also has a separate 2fa totp app.

hombre_fatal4• 9 months ago

Now that I'm not only using a Macbook and iPhone, I've been looking for cross-platform solutions.

For a week I've been using KeePassXC + Syncthing between four devices. Syncthing is also syncing my Obsidian vaults which has replaced Apple-only Notes.app.

Bitwarden is definitely more polished, and Syncthing is definitely (much) more fiddly than using Bitwarden's and Obsidian's ($5/mo) native syncing tools.

But I like the idea of having the same syncing solution across all apps on all devices. Curious if anybody can recommend this setup or if collisions will make it unbearable.

theonething2• 9 months ago

Can anyone with experience with 1Password and Bitwarden share their opinions on each.

I've been on 1Password for years and am wondering if I'm missing anything.

neogodless3• 9 months ago

I use unique email addresses per domain name, and I believe IHaveBeenPwned shows me at 39 unique email addresses breached! (So many that seeing which ones have been breached would now cost me $22 / month... IHaveBeenPwned is starting to feel like an extortion racket of its own..)

mrbluecoat• 9 months ago

I feel you. The aggregate email breach list just feels like a rainbow table at this point.

esnard• 9 months ago

If you're using the same domain for each of your email address, HIBP has a domain-wide search feature which is free (but you need to register to validate your domain)

Razengan• 9 months ago

So by this point, if anyone does anything naughty online they could just pin it on an hacker using their identity, no?

TZubiri5• 9 months ago

Right. Having some data leaked isn't really a boolean, leaked/unleaked. It's a list of leaks, and the implicit map betweenyl your datapoints, whether by intra or interprovider mapping

For example a forum might leak a map between your mail and a password; Implicitly your affinity for that forum's topic is also now on the public record, additionally if your posts were public but under a pseudonym, that might be now known by a sufficiently motivated attacker.

Finally this may be linked with other public datasources like your public tweets or public state records, or even other leaks.

This is why the meme about all ssn's being leaked or about a list of all valid phone numbers is so asinine.

sixothree• 9 months ago

Even if you weren't breached, the sophistication is getting higher too. New hires get emails starting literally day one because email formats follow a pattern and they posted their new job on linkedin (or something).

NegativeLatency• 9 months ago

what if anything can be done at this point

I'm in a similar situation, just make sure your credit is frozen with the 3 major US companies. I had someone steal like $50 of cable TV with my info in another state and it was a major pain to get off of my credit report.

dheera• 9 months ago

I generally don't give my real address or real phone number to anyone who doesn't legally need it. I use a virtual address as the billing address on my credit cards and for registering for things that don't need to know where I sleep.

The government can have at my real info, but private companies have bad data security.

8cvor6j844qw_d62• 9 months ago

I used per-account email with alias services and password managers.

Also started migrating old accounts in free time.

Now its pretty easy to tell the source of leak by email addresses as well as sources of spam.

---

Per-account alias might sound much, but using sieve filtering [1] is amazing, and you can get a comprehensive filtering solution going with 'envelope to' (the actual address receiving the email) + 'header to' (the recipient address you see, sometimes filtering rules don't filter for BCC or sometimes recipients are alias instead of your actual email) that are more comprehensive than normal filtering rules to sort your emails into folders.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5228

---

Amusingly, I've managed to recover old accounts from emails that contains my old passwords with demands for crypto payment, it just provided me enough help to recall old variations of my passwords.

lelandfe• 9 months ago

(the keyboard smash username is apropos)

Per-account alias might sound much

Not only does this not sound too much, this is a feature Apple offers called Hide My Email: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102548

ekropotin• 9 months ago

I just use <myname>+<service>@gmail.com At the end of day day it’s all delivered to myname@gmail.com mailbox, but I can use filters based on part after “+”.

sometimes_all3• 9 months ago

I also use per-account emails, but not sieve filtering. Catch-all is helpful for throw-aways, aliases for the more important stuff.

It's super-easy to figure out who leaks my emails to whom, so I can easily disable both the leaker and the people who leaked.

Much more user-friendly than Apple's hide-my-email.

scoot2• 9 months ago

I used per-account email [addresses] with alias services

I do too (anything@mysubdomain.example.com), but but online services collude with data brokers to share so much information [0] that I don't doubt that many of these "separate" profiles have been aggregated.

Unfortunately the services that supposedly offer to have your personal data removed from data brokers don't seem to support aliasing, so no straightforward way to either find out or have the data removed.

[0] Just look at the scary list of third-party cookies you can't opt out of on Coursera [1], for example:

Match and combine data from other data sources 419 partners can use this feature Always Active

Identify devices based on information transmitted automatically 546 partners can use this feature Always Active

Link different devices 358 partners can use this feature Always Active

Deliver and present advertising and content 582 partners can use this special purpose Always Active

[1] https://www.coursera.org/about/cookies-manage

jwr• 9 months ago

I used per-account email with alias services and password managers.

For people who want to do this, be sure to get it right. I run a SaaS with a free tier, and I see people register with "fancy+nospam+servicename@gmail.com" addresses. Many of those become undeliverable or are left unread forever because of filtering rules. So when my system sends a warning E-mail that the account will be deleted due to inactivity, it doesn't get read, which leads to suboptimal outcomes for everyone involved.

toddmerrill• 9 months ago

I do this also. I started doing it with physical mail before email existed to sort out the junk mail, so first and last name always contained a reference to the company you were dealing with. Paul Allen back in the 80s said in a Seattle Times interview that it was how he handled it.

6c696e7578• 9 months ago

I used per-account email with alias services and password managers.

20-something-ish years ago I setup qmail in my VPS and a .qmail-default file captures all my me-sitename@vps emails. If they send me junk I echo '#' > .qmail-sitename and that's the end of it.

Other things that get a mixture like someone annoying who harvested my ebay/paypal addresses or something, I'll sift out the good (stuff I need) via maildrop and everything else gets junked.

Honestly one of the best, but annoying, things I've done, well worth the time invested as I have a nice clean mailbox.

varispeed• 9 months ago

I bet now some corporations actually want to be exposed, have data breach. If you have not been in the news, it means you have not made it yet (not popular enough to be a target worth writing about).

esseph3• 9 months ago

Those CISOs / CTOs / CIOs attached to those companies do not want to be in the news.

edoceo2• 9 months ago

Right to be removed/purged and maximum retention policy. One place I'm aware of purges accounts that have been inactive 18month. Historical billing info is offline and "gapped"

sandeepkd• 9 months ago

To confirm, data/info leaks happened on the server/application side. How does a solution like Bitwarden on the client side helps with this situation?

As per my understanding the only possible threat it saves against is someone trying to brute force for your password against the application. And may be ease the cognitive burden of remembering different passwords.

theonething2• 9 months ago

freeze your credit at the three major companaies.

ulfw• 9 months ago

Exactly this.

Does anyone still care?

I like how the Apple Password app informs you about Compromised Passwords so you can you know... go in and fix it, get a new password etc.

Nice little cute idea.

I got 717 warnings. Seven hundred seven teen.

No I will never be able to fix this

ErroneousBosh• 9 months ago

It's probably more important to keep passwords safe, but lots of people treat their email address like some kind of "sensitive secret". "Oh but I don't want to get spam" - my dude you are going to get spam.

There's a guy who lives near me who, when he parks his car, very carefully puts tape over the number plate "because otherwise people might see my registration number". Because apparently if people can see your car's registration number they can somehow just steal your car and the police won't do anything because the number plate was visible. Mad, absolutely barking mad.

somehnguy• 9 months ago

Same, and I find it really difficult to care about it anymore.

It was leaked through no fault of my own. There are 0 actual consequences to companies doing it. So what am I going to do - stew about it??

submeta• 9 months ago

I have a throwaway email adresses for every website that requires signup. And a new password for every signup. Using Fastemail and a password manager. When emails adresses/passwords leak, I know which one I have to replace.

hypeatei• 9 months ago

Cynicism is everywhere these days but these events really don't register for me anymore. Companies aren't punished by the government for these leaks and they aren't punished by consumers either. What incentive is there to reduce this data collection in the first place or to lock down your databases?

Even if someone's security is awful as the consumer and their account gets hacked because of these leaks, what are the actual consequences of that? Oh bummer, they need to reset their password and make a few phone calls to their bank to reverse the fraudulent charges then life goes on. Techies view that as unacceptable but most don't really care.

morshu90012• 9 months ago

I don't care for most things, but banking is one place I've been bitten pretty hard without even getting hacked. Not going to extremes to protect it, just gonna make sure it's decent.

eckesicle• 9 months ago

Is there any real drawback to just never giving your real name or address to service providers to minimise the chance of identity theft? Most likely it’s against terms of service, but other than account suspension are you likely to suffer any legal consequences?

bigbuppo• 9 months ago

The ad tech companies can associate any fake identity with your real identity. So no, there is no problem. Good thing that all ad tech companies are fully on the up-and-up and have never been compromised to spread malware.

Aurornis• 9 months ago

Service providers generally use your name and address to validate your billing method.

If you can pay by some method that doesn’t require name or address then go ahead and use a fake name.

legitster2• 9 months ago

Depending on the service, the billing data may be in its own database outside of the user tables.

rkagerer3• 9 months ago

Anonimity on the Internet is going out of vogue.

The only way to fix the ToS issue you raised is through regulation protecting it.

Unfortunately we're going the other direction, with efforts like verified ID gaining traction in some parts of the world.

It's ironic because in most cases anonymity (or allowing an alternate identity that has its own built-up reputation) would offer real protection, while the verification systems are arguably security theatre.

I don't care what technical genius is built into your architecture, as soon as you force a user to plug their ID information into it, they've forked over control along with any agency to protect their own safety.

hn_acc12• 9 months ago

I mean, for some services, likes banks / credit cards, it's required..

For others, I try to stay anonymous / aliased where possible.

rkagerer3• 9 months ago

The bit at the end about email deliverability was also interesting:

Notifying our subscribers is another problem... in terms of not ending up on a reputation naughty list or having mail throttled by the receiving server .... Not such a biggy for sending breach notices, but a major problem for people trying to sign into their dashboard who can no longer receive the email with the "magic" link.

And this observation he got from someone:

the strategy I've found to best work with large email delivery is to look at the average number of emails you've sent over the last 30 days each time you want to ramp up, and then increase that volume by around 50% per day until you've worked your way through the queue

legitster2• 9 months ago

This is also known as "warming a domain" in the email world. A large rush of emails from an email server is an indicator of a hack or takeover, so anti-spam software may flag an IP address that surges in activity.

jimmar• 9 months ago

I respect Troy Hunt's work. I searched for my email address on https://haveibeenpwned.com/, and my email was in the latest breach data set. But the site does not give me any way to take action. haveibeenpwned knows what passwords were breached, the people who breached the data knows what passwords were breached, but there does not seem to be any way for _me_, the person affected, to know what password were breached. The takeaway message is basically, "Yeah, you're at risk. Use good password practices."

There is no perfect solution. Obviously, we don't want to give everybody an easy form where you can enter an email address and see all of the password it found. But I'm not going to reset 500+ password because one of them might have been compromised. It seems like we must rely on our password managers (BitWarden, 1Password, Chrome's built-in manager, etc.) to tell us if individual passwords have been compromised.

junon2• 9 months ago

https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

AlienRobot2• 9 months ago

my password: 2,408

password: 46,628,605

your password: 609

good password: 22

long password: 2

secure password: 317

safe password: 29

bad password: 86

this password sucks: 1

i hate this website: 16

username: 83,569

my username: 4

your username: 1

let me login: 0

admin: 41,072,830

abcdef: 873,564

abcdef1: 147,103

abcdef!: 4,109

abcdef1!: 1,401

123456: 179,863,340

hunter2: 50,474

correct horse battery staple: 384

Correct Horse Battery Staple: 19

to be or not to be: 709

all your base are belong to us: 1

bdcravens• 9 months ago

I was trying random phrases just out of curiosity, and couldn't help but chuckle when it said "epsteinfiles" wasn't found :-)

the84723• 9 months ago

This doesn't help. If the email address check says the address has been exposed it doesn't tell you which password that was used together with that has been exposed. Was it one from 10 years ago you don't even remember? Or that's still actively in use? Which one of my hundreds of passwords?

elzbardico• 9 months ago

It seems like we must rely on our password managers (BitWarden, 1Password, Chrome's built-in manager, etc.) to tell us if individual passwords have been compromised.

Yes.

karencarits• 9 months ago

One possible solution could be to give you an option to send the affected password as a list to the mail address you specify, then only people with access to that mail address will see them

elwebmaster3• 9 months ago

That would be a great idea!

bobmcnamara3• 9 months ago

Hash of the affected password? People share these things and don't always run their own mail servers.

technion• 9 months ago

At one point I responded to a haveibeenpwned notice by immediately having the user reset a password.

I've got over 200 users in a domain search (edit: for this particular incident), and nearly all of them were in previous credential breaches that were probably stuffed into this one. I'm not going to put them through a forced annoyance given how likely it is the breached password is not their current one, and I'm urging people to start moving in this direction unless you obtain a more concrete piece of advice.

kbrkbr• 9 months ago

Same here: reset on first beach (ROFB), but on subsequent ones only if it is no collection, eg a new infostealer breach.

fckgw• 9 months ago

The problem with breaches like the latest data set is that there's no source on where the breach came from, it's an aggregate from multiple breaches. They can't tell you that info because it's not in the initial data set.

chinathrow3• 9 months ago

Yeah and I am confused by his new setup private vs business. I got that mail too but can simply not see what addresses were affected by that breach.

craftkiller• 9 months ago

there does not seem to be any way for _me_, the person affected, to know what password were breached

You should be using a unique randomly-generated password for each website. That way, one breach doesn't lead to multiple accounts getting hijacked AND you'll know which passwords were breached solely based on the website list. The only passwords I still keep in my head are:

  1. The password to my password manager
  2. The password to my gmail account
  3. The passwords for my full disk encryption

All of those passwords are unique and not used anywhere else. Everything else is in my password manager with a unique randomly generated password for each account. And for extra protection, I enable 2fa on any site that supports u2f/webauthn.

I used to reuse the same password for everything, and that lead to a pretty miserable month where suddenly ALL of my accounts were compromised. I'd log in to one account and see pizzas I never ordered. Then I'd open uber and see a ride actively in-progress on the other side of the country. It was not fun.

taftster3• 9 months ago

Yes! Me too. Not adding anything here except a confirmation on the above approach. You kind of need your email password as a "break glass" scenario. But mostly, you just need your password manager.

tengwar2• 9 months ago

Also if possible, use a unique email address for each site. I know that's not feasible for most people, and some sites (e.g. LinkedIn) are structured so that email addresses become linked, but it does provide useful isolation.

subscribed4• 9 months ago

Nice. Now I'd like to know WHICH password got leaked.

That way the breach impact can quickly be limited.

Troy probably would share that information for a price. Not sure whom to pay though - the "good" guy who won't say a word, or a criminal who will happily share it with me?

It's possible the latter would be cheaper too.

TZubiri5• 9 months ago

What? You expect the guy to tell you your password? Lol, lmao even.

I know roughly what passwords were exposed because either I remember it, or the date of the leak or the associated email.

I know simple passwords are almost public and that leaks of say linkedin will be properly hashed, while a vb forum from 2006 might not be.

pessimizer• 9 months ago

But the site does not give me any way to take action.

It gives you as much information as you should be given. Any more information would just be spreading around the hacked dataset.

It does give you an awful lot of information about the specific hacks that exposed your information, and what was the content of that exposure. You may have been owned, but the way you were owned doesn't really matter e.g. I don't care that my firstname.lastname@gmail.com was exposed as being me. I may not care that my username@yahoo.com account was exposed as being username at archive.org. If that's it, I can keep using them. But a lot of hacks are a lot worse, and you might have to rearrange things or close them down. haveibeenpwned gives you enough information to make all those decisions.

Also, your second paragraph seems to imply that the site doesn't tell you if passwords were compromised for an email address. It definitely does by identifying the hack and describing its extent. You don't need the actual password to know that you need to change it. Likely, the hacked site forced you to change it anyway.

froddd4• 9 months ago

Change the password for what account though? The dashboard doesn’t seem to list the actual website(s ) linked to the email/password breached, so how am I to know which password to rotate?

If I follow the recommended best practice, I have a different password for every website or service. That could be hundreds of them. Am I supposed to rotate all of them every time there’s a breach?

the84723• 9 months ago

It does give you an awful lot of information about the specific hacks

No it doesn't. Enter <old email address> → 5 data breaches → first one says:

During 2025, the threat-intelligence firm Synthient aggregated 2 billion unique email addresses disclosed in credential-stuffing lists found across multiple malicious internet sources

It doesn't tell me which site or which of the many passwords used together with that address. Just that it has been in a generic data dump.

subscribed4• 9 months ago

So it gives me the information that my email has been exposed.

Where? In what service? Did my password got leaked too? I can't change password / delete the account if I don't know where.

Did any other data got leaked? Anything sensitive? Do I have to cancel my credit card? Were any files leaked as well? My home location?

At this point HIBP is next to useless.

And how showing me WHAT is in the database about the email I proved I own would be spreading it? At this point if I want to learn it I need to either try to find the torrent with it (spreading it further!) or pay the criminals.

NetMageSCW7• 9 months ago

If you read the instructions, you will discover https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords which will let you enter a password and securely check if it has been published in a breach.

If it has, it is either a simple password that multiple people are using, or a complex secure password that can make you pretty confident it is your password that has been published.

1Password just does the same thing for all of your passwords - it doesn’t check against your account name either. That information isn’t stored so they can’t become a new source of breached accounts (as explained at the site).

donatj2• 9 months ago

Letting me check my passwords one at a time is like letting me check my grains of rice individually for poison before eating.

froddd4• 9 months ago

The details about the “Stealer Logs” on the dashboard even state:

The websites the stealer logs were captured against are searchable via the HIBP dashboard.

There is no way to use the HIBP dashboard to figure out what domains my email address appears against.

Am I meant to change all passwords associated with that email address? Or do I need to get a paid subscription to query the API to figure out exactly what password(s) to change?

This has always confused me. On the one hand, HIBP is an invaluable service, but, on the other, it does nothing more than stating you’re in trouble, with no clear way forward.

subscribed4• 9 months ago

It's quite certainly a up selling attempt. I once spend a couple of hours to see what was actually exposed in the infostealer breach my email appeared (eg: payment data? Physical address? Government id ?) to no avail.

This service is toxic tbh.

Thorrez6• 9 months ago

You don't need a paid subscription. The API is free.

https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3

jerf2• 9 months ago

On the plus side, Troy can save a lot of DB space now. Instead of storing which emails have been compromised at this point he can replace that with just

    def email_compromised(email):
        return True

Havoc• 9 months ago

Not necessarily. Both my main addresses still come back clean after years in use.

The one I use for random crap has 9 hits though.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe• 9 months ago

Same here

TheTxT• 9 months ago

In that case he could just store the emails that haven’t been compromised yet.

jerf2• 9 months ago

If we're going to take my obviously unserious suggestion seriously, I'd suggest a bigger problem is that his stack isn't in Python and the code for whether an email is pwned probably isn't remotely structured as a function call like that...

but other than that I'm sure it's a good idea.

brikym• 9 months ago

It boggles my mind that most email providers don't have a way to generate aliases for sign ups. Looks like proton and fastmail support it.

cryptoegorophy• 9 months ago

-Setup a website with article that 3 billion emails were exposed -Offer a form to check if your email was leaked -start getting confirmed emails list

sfilmeyer• 9 months ago

Troy Hunt has been running Have I Been Pwned for years. He even uses the k-anonymity model to allow you to search if a password has been pwned without giving him the password if you don't trust him.

I get your general point, but he's been a leader in this space and walking the walk for a decade. I'm not even into security stuff or anything particularly related to this, and I still recognized his name in the OP domain.

kmeisthax• 9 months ago

More importantly, since HIBP sells monitoring services to 1Password, if they were maliciously collecting this data they would be immediately sued to oblivion.

gorgoiler• 9 months ago

I’ve always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about HIBP’s switch to charging for domain searches. It felt a bit like those travel visa scalpers who charge 50 CURRENCY_UNIT to file an otherwise gratis form on your behalf.

Law enforcement should provide this kind of service as a public good. They don’t, but if you do instead, I don’t think it’s cool to unilaterally privatize the service and turn it into a commercial one.

I voted with my feet but this post feels like a good enough place to soapbox a bit!

NetMageSCW7• 9 months ago

How much did you donate to keep HIBP running?

What is the URL to your free HIBP alternative?

debugnik• 9 months ago

However, none of the other passwords associated with my address were familiar.

Could at least some of those cracked passwords be hash collisions for really weak choices of hash? I once looked up an email of mine on a database leak, and found an actual outdated password except for random typos that I suspect hashed the same.

ptrl6002• 9 months ago

Are there any email services which allow basically unlimited aliases with long, random names?

I'm using my own domain right now, but that can only uncover who has leaked my data; does not provide additional privacy.

bootlooped• 9 months ago

I know you can set up "catch-all" email with a custom domain through Proton Mail.

I don't think there's any limit on gmail + codes.

mac-attack• 9 months ago

duckduckgo's free email aliases. Can use it as a front-end and keep your existing domain

ptrl6002• 9 months ago

I misphrased my query; I already run my own mail server and am using a unique e-mail address for every service. I'm wondering if there's a provider with a common domain name shared between lots of users that still allows such a large number of aliases. That would let me use a fake name for anything that doesn't need my real identity, and wouldn't reveal my identity in the case of a breach. Has any e-mail provider found a way to implement this while preventing abuse?

gostsamo2• 9 months ago

check simple login. they were both by Proton, but you can use them without the parent.

mapper32• 9 months ago

https://simplelogin.io/

mkl2• 9 months ago

Use a catch-all inbox. Fastmail supports them well in its web interface. I use unique addresses for every organisation.

ycuser22• 9 months ago

The problem with catch-all inbox is when you have to reply to an email. Then you have to create the email address to be able to send emails from it. Or are there other solutions?

omeletdufromage• 9 months ago

Another commenter mentions ProtonMail, but somewhat unadvertised is with a paid Proton sub (I forget which tier), you also get access to SimpleLogin. It's a service which lets you create new email aliases with your domain that just send them to another email you own. (Also lets you send emails as that alias, so the other end doesn't see your real address.)

I use it with Vault/Bitwarden, which lets me generate email addresses of format `<uuid>@my.domain.com` when I create new login info for services.

stOneskull• 9 months ago

proton unlimited, i think. mail plus doesn't seem to do it, which kinda sucks.

gostsamo2• 9 months ago

I checked a few of my passwords and a few random ideas. It turns out that I'm not the only one who finds the Star wars drone names a good inspiration for a password, but the rest were okay. Proud that I found a password which leaked in only one breech. Whoever has used "feromancer" as a pass, congrats, you might be unique among a big part of humanity.

sloped2• 9 months ago

I switched to using masked emails with Fastmail primarily so I could see who sold my data. The potential security benefit was not really a driver. Having 1Password be able to generate a unique email makes it a no-brainer these days. For those services that require a username that is not your email, they can usually be used without the domain part. Works really well.

I even wrote a tiny little local only web app that I can use to generate a masked email on my phone, so when I need an email for an in person thing I can just show them my brand new weird email directly on my phone.

digiconfucius• 9 months ago

Any interesting finds on companies that tried to sell your data?

sloped2• 9 months ago

Not really any places where things get sold, but opt-in in the background for newsletters is bad in certain sectors. Ticket platforms are terrible. I like to use a new email for every event and boy does that lead to new round of clicking opt-out until I can deactivate the email after the event has concluded.

frankdvn• 9 months ago

I just learned that FastMail provides an iOS shortcut to "Create Masked Email".

Just be careful, you must press Save after or else you'll lose it.

layer84• 9 months ago

Interestingly, the HIBP data seems to have an expiration date. My email address from the Dropbox data breach [0] is now shown as having no recorded breaches, although it did back in 2016 after HIBP acquired that dataset.

[0] https://haveibeenpwned.com/breach/Dropbox

reddalo• 9 months ago

Are you sure you typed the right email address?

My 2012 Dropbox leak still shows up for my account.

layer84• 9 months ago

Yes, I’m sure. The old password from that breach also doesn’t show any hits.

zahlman2• 9 months ago

From what HIBP tells me (from an email address; I am not about to put any site's password in there, I don't care that they don't know who I am or what it's for):

During 2025, the threat-intelligence firm Synthient aggregated 2 billion unique email addresses disclosed in credential-stuffing lists found across multiple malicious internet sources. Comprised of email addresses and passwords from previous data breaches, these lists are used by attackers to compromise other, unrelated accounts of victims who have reused their passwords. The data also included 1.3 billion unique passwords, which are now searchable in Pwned Passwords.

(Edit: this is also directly linked in TFA. Well, I guess the site was still somewhat successfully advertised here...)

So, this doesn't seem to comprise new information, and doesn't imply that your email has been associated with your password by the hackers.

Although they probably do have passwords for a couple of services I don't use any more, which I have not reused.

elwebmaster3• 9 months ago

Why are we still using passwords? Why can’t all login be done with asymmetric keys: your public keys are stored on the server, your private keys on the device. Carry a backup pair on your USB and treat it as a key to your house. Any of them got lost? Just delete the respective public key from the service.

magackame• 9 months ago

That's passkeys. Google and Microsoft are pushing in that direction.

elwebmaster3• 9 months ago

I have never seen a website where I can sign up without a password and using only email and passkey. Is there one? All websites treat passkeys as an “add-on” to the passwords of the last century. Totally backwards thinking.

mrweasel3• 9 months ago

How are you going to sign in and delete the public key, if you lost the private key?

This is exactly why so many do not want passkey, the recovery options aren't exactly great.

layer84• 9 months ago

Amusingly, hunter2 is listed with over 50.000 breaches.

waynesonfire• 9 months ago

Another ad for have i been owned? ... How much does it cost to advertise on hackernews?

galaxyLogic• 9 months ago

What about "pass-codes"? Weren't they supposed replace passwords?

anonu• 9 months ago

we run on Azure SQL Hyperscale, which we maxed out at 80 cores for almost two weeks

the data challenge is interesting here. there's clearly a lot of data - but really its just emails and passwords you need to keep track of. SQL feels like overkill that will be too slow and cost you too much. are there better solutions?

15 billion records of email+password, assume ~40bytes thats roughly 600GB

should be searchable with a an off-the-shelf server.

of course, im oversimplifying the problem. but I'm not clear why any solution to insert new records would take 2 weeks...

jiggawatts4• 9 months ago

we run on Azure SQL Hyperscale

Definitely the wrong technology, and was almost certainly picked only because Troy Hunt is a "Microsoft Regional Director and MVP".

Many other technologies scale better for this kind of workload. Heck, you could ask ChatGPT to write a short C# CLI tool to process the data on one machine, you don't even need a huge box.

This kind of thing comes up here regularly on HN for problems such as duplicate password detection, leaked password filtering, etc...

After previous brainstorming sessions the general consensus was that it's really hard to beat a binary file that contains the sorted SHA hashes. I.e.: if you have 1 billion records to search and you're using a 20-byte SHA1 hash, then create a file that is exactly 20 billion bytes in size. Lookup is (naively) just binary search, but you can do even better by guessing where in the file a hash is likely to be by utilising the essentially perfectly random distribution of hashes. I.e.: a hash with a first byte value of "25" is almost certainly going to be 10% of the way into the file, etc...

It's possible to create a small (~1 MB) lookup table that can guarantee lookups into the main file with only one I/O operation of a fixed size, such as 64 KB.

Sorting the data is a tiny bit fiddly, because it won't fit into memory for any reasonably interesting data size. There's tricks to this, such as splitting the data into 65,536 chunks based on the first two bytes, then sorting the chunks using a very ordinary array sort function from the standard library.

On blob storage this is super cheap to implement and host, about 50x cheaper than Azure SQL Hyperscale, even if it is scaled down to the minimum CPU count.

zazaulola2• 9 months ago

Try Blake3 instead SHA-1

https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3

Stebet2• 9 months ago

Hi.

Stefán (the other HIBP developer) here :)

There are good reasons for the tech we picked. I’ll elaborate in a more detailed answer later today or tomorrow.

I love good nerd discussions.

Stebet2• 9 months ago

Hi. Stefán here again, the other HIBP dev and first employee: https://www.troyhunt.com/have-i-been-pwned-employee-1-0-stef...

So, here's a small blurb to clear up some misunderstandings. Excuse the typos since I'm writing in a bit of a hurry.

Most of the data processing is actually done in CLI tools we created and not in Azure SQL HyperScale. That includes things like:

* Extracting email addresses (from either csv or other delimited files). This can be problematic because it turns out people that gather this data aren't always thinking about encoding etc. so very often we need to jump through hoops to get it to work mostly correct. And when we see files like this huge breach that contains multi-terabyte CSVs, you need a tool that is both fast and memory efficient. For this breach we actually wrote our own to do this since other tools we tried often choked with out-of-memory errors or simply ran too slow. We will likely be open sourcing some of these tools.

* Extracting emails is one thing, extracting passwords is another and has totally different requirements.

Emails we need to extract in a case-insensitive way, for stealer logs we also need to parse the domains associated with the email. We need to hash the email because the hashes are used for k-anonymity purposes as well as batching purposes for internal processes.

Passwords we need to also hash (SHA1 and NTLM) for Pwned Passwords, but that also needs to make sure that we use consistent encoding. We also need to dedupe AND count them for prevalence purposes.

This we can all mostly do without touching Azure SQL HyperScale.

Once we have prepared the data, it needs to be inserted into the DB. It's not a case of creating simple binary lookup tables because we have different requirements and have at least three different ways of looking up an email address.

1. The full email (alias + domain)

2. Domain lookups (just domain)

3. K-anonymity lookups (first 6 chars of the SHA1 of the full email address)

This requires emails to not just be indexed based on the alias and the domain (which we denormalize into a domain-id). We also need indexes on things like the SHA1 prefix and we need to take into account when people have opted out of having their emails loaded.

Reasons for Azure SQL HyperScale: The email and domain search data used to be stored in Azure Table Storage. It was very convenient since it was fast to look up (partition keys and row keys) and cheap to store. There was one big drawback though. Azure Table Storage has no backup or point-in-time restore strategy. The only way to back up/restore data is to download it and reupload as a restore mechanism. Which is easy enough, except downloading the data was starting to take a week, even running in a VM in the same datacenter as the Table Storage account. And for a service like Have I Been Pwned, if we had a disaster or messed up a breahc load and had to roll-back, taking everything offline or having the wrong data for a week is unacceptable.

That's where Azure SQL HyperScale came in. The reason it was picked is not because Troy has a Microsoft RD or me being an MVP. We simply picked it because we both know MS SQL very well, we have good access to people that know it even better than us (for support purposes) and it has a very good, tried and tested backup/restore scenarios.

We do know that there are certainly better DBs that we can use, and it would probably be cheaper to run our own Postgres on our own hardware, or something on that note, but since it's just two people actively working on this and we hardly have time for development of new features and breach loads as it is, we simply couldn't spend valuable time on learning the ins and outs of a new DB engine, what it takes to run/maintain/optimize and all the other SRE responsibilities that come with it.

So in the end, it came down to convenience and what our time is best spent on doing.

Rest assured though, with everything we learned processing this breach, we will be much quicker to process the next really large breach, since we have taken a ton of learnings, new tools and processes that we'll be implementing. I'd expect the next breach of this size to take just a couple of days to process. Most other breaches take a lot less since they are a fraction of the size of this one.

Binary files: Pwned passwords is currently stored in blob storage containing just the first 5 chars of the hash in the filename and the rest in a line delimited, ordered fashion. I have already done some tests on having them binary files (since the hashes are always a fixed size, and the prevlance is just an int). So we could technically have each hash entry be 17 bytes (rest of the hash) + 4 bytes for the prevalence (unsigned 32-bit int) so just 21 bytes for each hash entry, and we skip newlines. And we might actually go that route in the not to distant future since it's easy to do.

Hope that clears up some of our thoughts here :) I'm planning on writing a blog soon with most of the things we learned so that might shed further light and insights on how we process this.

enjaydee2• 9 months ago

Thought the same thing, and agree completely with jiggawatts. Troy does very well off the back of this relationship, and on that note I hate how confusing the marketing language of "Microsoft Regional Director and MVP" is.

bobmcnamara3• 9 months ago

I'm not clear why any solution to insert new records would take 2 weeks...

The article mentions some of the challenges, like 1.9e9 sha1 hashes. And 1.9e9 row updates performing poorly in-place, so they created a separate table for the results. Then they got rate limited by email providers when they wanted to tell people about their pwnage

jorams2• 9 months ago

This seems to include details from a Spotify data breach in or before early 2020 that, to my knowledge, was never reported on. They did have other, similar issues that year.

Reporting from the time seems to all be about one or multiple leaks/attacks involving:

- Credential stuffing with data from other breaches

- A leak of data (including email addresses) to "certain business partners" between April 9, 2020 and November 12, 2020.

On April 2, 2020 somebody logged in to my Spotify account (which had a very weak password) from a US IP address. This account used an email address only ever used to sign up to Spotify years earlier, and the account had been unused for years by that point. I changed the password minutes later. A few hours after that Spotify also sent an automatic password reset because of "suspicious activity". At no point have I ever been notified by Spotify that my data had been leaked, though it obviously had, and now said email finally shows up on HIBP.

Torn• 9 months ago

You'd think spotify as a mature company would have had obligations to report this stuff!

ChrisMarshallNY• 9 months ago

I think, at this point, we should just assume that our emails are out there. Can't put the candy back in the piñata.

My main email addy is an OG mac.com address. I registered it about five minutes after Steve announced it. My wife got her first name, but I suspect that Chris Espinosa already had chris@mac.com.

In any case, it was compromised back when Network Solutions sold their database to spammers (or some other scumbags sold their database), and it's been feral, ever since. Basically, most of this century.

I've survived it. I maintain Inbox Zero, frequently.

One of the saving graces, is that mac.com has "aged out," so most of the spammers switched over to icloud.com, and that means I can just set up a rule to bin anything that comes into icloud.com.

1970-01-01• 9 months ago

Giving out fake information is the only solution. Real name is only for the government and your employer.

1a527dd5• 9 months ago

This explains why my outlook/hotmail account had a 2fa prompt from a country I've never been in a few days ago.

Checked my password on https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords :-

  This password has been seen 1 times before in data breaches!

_Great_.

Retr0id• 9 months ago

The scale of infostealer malware is really staggering. I'd have naively assumed that OSes were getting locked down so much by default these days that local malware was less of an issue.

hk1337• 9 months ago

I'm guessing this is total, not an alert that something happened last night that exposed 2 billion email addresses.

jacquesm• 9 months ago

I totally respect Troy and the work he's doing, but I still can't justify to myself the risk of typing my passwords into his website because that would be the very first time that I would use any of those in places other than the ones where I normally use them.

Is there a way around this?

Edit: to answer my own question, I should read a bit more rather than click on the first link, the answer is here:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3?ref=troyhunt.com#PwnedPass...

Which uses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity

arealaccount• 9 months ago

DM me your passwords Ill do it for you

mbana• 9 months ago

Do some research on passwords, in particular read Bruce Schneier's stance on passwords.

senorqa• 9 months ago

If there's no meaningful reward or punishment for keeping or leaking PII, companies won't do anything about it. They'll keep collecting sensitive inf unless they're educated or forced not to collect unnecessary PII.

tencentshill• 9 months ago

We need to make storing customer data and recommendation algorithms a liability.

adabyron• 9 months ago

Not just this but the lack of diligence by companies that allow accounts to be created, bills to go unpaid & then sent to collection agencies is something that needs to change.

Speaking as someone who has had companies give away my PII and then other companies open accounts with it without contacting me until bills are due.

None of this should be the fault of innocent individuals.

yawgmoth• 9 months ago

When you have days like this, 2-10 billion and you want to search it, what are the cheapest options? Reindexing could be slow, be search should be reasonably quick. It would be really expensive to do this all in, say, Elastic, right? Especially if you had a bunch of columns?

8cvor6j844qw_d62• 9 months ago

Anyone have thoughts on Bitwarden / 1Password / Proton Pass?

Proton Pass feels too new for me but eagerly awaiting good feedbacks / reviews. However, "don't put all your eggs in one basket" might apply here.

Went with Bitwarden instead of 1Password since its open source, and I imagine (in my uninformed opinion) that a larger userbase by being free means more issues might be encountered and ironed out.

LilBytes• 9 months ago

1Password is awesome.

I haven't really looked at anything else but I found >2 years ago the UI of BitWarden to be ordinary. And it was more awkward to manage a company.

Went with 1Password in the end, and that you get a free Family account with a Business account is great.

Your position on how BitWarden is open source should contribute to any decision you make though.

frm88• 9 months ago

I switched from Windows to Linux a couple of weeks ago and to KeePass XC. I like it that I can easily copy/paste passwords on sites where autofill is not allowed, e.g. banking. It's free, open source, no tracking and local and you can donate directly to the org. Of late I grow somewhat allergic to commercial solutions.

txtsd• 9 months ago

I suggest KeepassXC + SyncThing + KeepassDX (for Android)

mrweasel3• 9 months ago

If you're happy with Bitwarden, I think you should stick to that. I'm currently using 1Password, I switches after the security issues with Lastpass. Later I did try Bitwarden but was unhappy with the ability to correctly identify username and password fields on websites. Others tell me that they have more a better experience with Bitwarden, so I might have to give it a try again.

1Password is really nice, but it's also expensive, compared to Bitwarden.

lisbbb• 9 months ago

I'm sorry, but I couldn't really follow what the hell that guy was writing. So some huge number of emails and passwords got exposed somehow?

Springtime2• 9 months ago

This is a massive PITA for any users who exclusively use unique passwords and various unique addresses, as it sounds like the source of the breach(es) is unknown (so hard to judge which accounts would be affected without using Troy's sites to test everything or find some searchable dump online somewhere dubious).

NetMageSCW7• 9 months ago

Just check each unique password and then you know which sites need a password change?

Springtime2• 9 months ago

That would be hundreds to check. While for the quoted users in the article all but one seems to have reused their password(s), suggesting fewer used overall so easier to check.

dmje• 9 months ago

I’m unclear how the new data helps anyone? If you identify you’ve been in a data breach with Adobe for instance, you change your Adobe password. But if you’re in this new dataset there’s no service being pointed at - just “you’ve been breached” which doesn’t really help anyone apart from those who have the same pwd for everything. Maybe they’re the audience, I’m unclear.

pacificmint• 9 months ago

I agree. I wish it would tell me the password, there is a good chance I could identify the service that it came from based on the password. This way it doesn’t feel that useful.

hufdr• 9 months ago

I feel like my phone number and email have already been leaked a long time ago. These days I get spam emails almost every day, and random calls from different cities keep coming in. What I keep wondering is how all this data gets out there. Is there an entire underground business built around selling our information?

seb12043• 9 months ago

Yes, unfortunately there is a whole industry out there after your data.

fencepost2• 9 months ago

I was mildly annoyed by the handling of this for domains. I have a personal domain, and now I know that one of the generally service-specific email addresses I've used (most likely with a unique password unless it's Palm levels of old) has been breached with its password. I don't know which one because I don't have a high enough (paid) account.

If I'd realized that jumping through the hoops to get onto the site was just going to tell me I'd need a paid account I'd have saved myself a few minutes. As it was it made the whole experience feel like I fell for a sales email.

saintamh• 9 months ago

Domain search is free. I never paid for HIBP and they give me a list of every address @my-domain that’s been leaked.

Edit: others are pointing out that it’s only free for domains with fewer than 10 pwned addresses. I have 8.

fencepost2• 9 months ago

The message I got wasn't related to the number of addresses affected (though I've been using this approach for a couple decades), but IIRC regarded whether the datasets in question were free.

mrweasel3• 9 months ago

This is exactly while I and incredibly reluctant to sign up for any new service. You have to offer me something very special for me to ever create an account with your site. A free trial simply isn't enough for me to wanting to deal with yet another account, and I have a password manager.

Sign in with Google/Apple/Facebook/Microsoft/Github, whatever, could have been a solution, but I don't believe any of them to trustworthy long term.

voidUpdate• 9 months ago

Ah, so that's why I've been receiving emails about suspicious attempted logins...

jonathanstrange• 9 months ago

I don't understand "email leaks." My email has and always will be public, that's the whole point of having an email address. It's on my website so people can contact me.

w4lker• 9 months ago

I have several doubts about the utility of haveibeenpwned. For example, I know for a fact that a certain email of mine have been exposed, but it never appears on the site.

WhereIsTheTruth2• 9 months ago

This website is very useful, you can target any individuals and find all their secrets (websites they browse, their data and passwords)

More seriously, they should notify the owner of the email address privately rather than displaying it publicly, this can be easily weaponized

But who cares right, they are monetizing the service..

NetMageSCW7• 9 months ago

None of that is true, but you keep your outrage going.

WhereIsTheTruth2• 9 months ago

If that makes you sleep better at night, you are free to believe none of that is true and just move on..

donatj2• 9 months ago

Many people here have echoed similar sentiments, but I really wish they would give you any sort of information so you could have any sort of idea of what got pwned and ideally when. Was it a bank account, or some random forum? As it stands the action of even processing this data was of very little utility.

As with roughly a quarter of the planet, I was in this breach. My 1Password Watchtower is green. I cycle important passwords regularly. Back 10-15 years ago my passwords like most peoples were much shorter and not randomly generated. All of them for everything show up in the passwords search.

The utility of Have I Been Pwned approaches zero the longer you have been on the internet, and I have been on the internet since the late 1990s.

We're left in a place where everyone but the victim knows the compromised account, and that's just kind of absurdly useless.

jve2• 9 months ago

The utility of Have I Been Pwned approaches zero the longer you have been on the internet, and I have been on the internet since the late 1990s.

I mean if your 1Password is green then HIBP has definitely helped.

First of all, without HIBP, you wouldn't have Watchtower.

HIBP has raised awareness on having unique passwords per site.

HIBP has achieved that multiple services now can and check if particular password is leaked or not.

Of course you could argue that since your security hygiene is so good you don't need HIBP. True. Let's pretend every people on planet will be generating unique passwords per service. Great. HIBP will have achieved enourmous job of making the planet more secure.

And still a notification if you appear in some breach that can be attributed to a service - good signal to change password.

Hats off for you cycling the password.. Have you ever ran into problems with that? Say you kinda rotated password but it no longer is accepted or something?

TabTwo• 9 months ago

Got 10 hits. 8 of the email adressess were invalid like user1@ and user2@ while user@ would be the valid one

L_226• 9 months ago

Is Troy rotating out old breaches? Because I have 2 email addresses that were definitely part of leaks (I got notified by the parties that were hacked), and one of them used to show up as compromised on the site, but no longer. The other one was part of the Qantas frequent flyer leak (I got an email from Qantas about it), but this address doesn't show up as part of that leak.

mdale• 9 months ago

Almost like it's irresponsible to not require 2 factor now days.

dangerboysteve• 9 months ago

Is it me, or is anyone just numb to all these breach articles? I take all the precautions, use 2FA everywhere, stay away from sketchy sites, use ad/malware blocker and the issue is always never the individual. It's usually the website/app and their lack of security, not keeping up with patching or sloppy programming.

bookofjoe• 9 months ago

As a complete non-techie reading hundreds of comments on this it strikes me that there are a pretty much unlimited number of solutions/methods employed and described by HN readers — which makes me conclude none of them is THE best answer. It's like we say in medicine: the fact that there are 100 remedies for hiccups means none of them usually work.

timvisee• 9 months ago

The email I have in that list is invalid and must be generated. It's on a domain I own.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 9 months ago

As used here, the term "preventative" means an approach or strategy that seeks to prevent email addresses from becoming public and term "remedial" means an approach or strategy that seeks to limit damage if email addresses become public

To reduce risk from data breaches one option is to send less personal data to websites rather than more (preventative)

One old strategy is to not "sign up" for websites unless absolutely necessary (preventative), e.g., to complete a commercial transaction. On the early www, sites publishing public information generally did not ask for email addresses

Another old strategy is to use account-specific addresses and account-specific passwords that identify the account, the date and the computer used, i.e., some user-contructed identifier only known to the computer user (remedial)

Alas today's website operators, including ones offering nothing more than public information, attempt to convince visitors to "sign up" and submit email addresses, even when it is not necessary to access the public information

The website operators benefit from this data collection

As such, data collectors may not recommend that users stop signing up for websites and sending email addresses (preventative). It would reduce their benefit. Instead, they encourage it

HIBP is one such data collector. It requests email addresses in order to search public information

HIBP focuses on behavioural trends with respect to passwords (remedial) instead of behavioural trends in sharing personal data with website operators (preventative)

The operator even admits having an interest in password managers

"My interest in 1Password aside"

Data breaches share private information with the public, making it, detrimentally,^1 public information. This is how it becomes accessible to HIBP

An obvious mitigation strategy is to limit the amount of private information collected (preventative), thereby limiting the amount that could ever be shared with the public in a data breach. This is "preventative"

HIBP is "remedial", i.e., it assumes private information has become public. Without data breaches to collect and search, HIBP would not exist

The two approaches, preventative and remedial, are not mutually exclusive

Both can be used at the same time (preventative plus remedial)

HIBP appears to ignore the preventative approach of modifying behaviour to not submit email addresses to websites. Perhaps because HIBP itself engages in data collection. It solicits email addresses

Unfortunately, one cannot use an account-specific address with HIBP. It solicits addresses that have potentially been used for other accounts

1. Arguably breaches are not detrimental for HIBP since it profits from their existence. If there were a reduction in data breaches, could HIBP continue to successfully solicit more email addresses. If there were behavioural changes the resulted in www users creating fewer accounts and sharing fewer email addresses, would demand for password managers suuch as 1Password be reduced

mgpalmer• 8 months ago

Great work by the HIBP team as usual but I am puzzled by something, maybe someone can shed light on it?

I'm managing a domain search dashboard for a company, and for one domain all the recent stealer log breaches contained addresses with the domain - but all the local/user parts were bogus - for example, fabuchoy@example.org where fabuchoy was never a user, the email never existed.

So nothing is in danger but where do these bogus addresses come from? Is someone just trying to log in somewhere with random addresses (with our domain) and then the (failed) login attempt gets sniffed by some malware and ends up in the breach dumps? Or are the cybercriminals just padding their dumps with made-up addresses?

Two billion email addresses were exposed

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