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.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
It was infuriating to me when normal_email+site_name@gmail.com stopped working for registration on some sites.
Fucked up my Costco registration, a variety of other things.
This sort of quasi-pseudonymity is required for basic security/privacy in 2025; It's the only way to get a handle on who's allowed to send you email, since we've never bothered to fix spoofing or impose a cost on spam. I've been trying to use it since Sneakemail was a free service back in the pre-Gmail days.
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 “+”.
This is one of the reasons I switched to a different provider using a custom domain. I can make new addresses in any format I want. There's zero risk of a spammer stripping them down to a base address for the primary account. They also don't get rejected by broken validators.
What’s your plan for when you no longer own your custom domain (think bus factor)? Someone else register your domain and now has access to all your accounts.
Everyone has their own risk profiles, mine assumes I retain control over my domains and emails. I prepay for them several months in advance to make sure I don't lose ownership. any service provider worth their salt will have a human factor for customer support who can help you if any such issues show up.
Thank you for expanding. Sure you can prepay up to a certain extent. Eventually your domain will be available to others for purchase and therefore your accounts will become vulnerable. Maybe this isn’t an issue if in the worst situation you’re not around but if this could cause chaos for your friends and family I would suggest taking it into account.
yep, i use fastmail with a custom domain. i have a catch all email set up, so i just register any account on sitename.com as "sitename@mydomain" and it all gets sorted into a catch all folder. I can then run rules if i want it to go into a certain category like "bills" or just straight to the garbage.
Not sure about normalizing recipients' emails but some are definitely aware of it because I've seen spam that asked to "reply back to defi.n.it.ely.not.shady+email@gmail.com" or something.
The downside is that https://haveibeenpwned.com/ can only find "exact email" addressed, as in, you must search for myname@gmail.com, myname+service1@gmail.com, etc.
I do this as well, but there are a number of service providers that just do not handle subaddressing at all. Like creating an account will result in never receiving a confirmation or verification code because the system failed to parse the address.
I've started using grouped aliases instead for a bunch of things.
Careful with this method. I was unable to purchase plane tickets from Southwest or even change my email address because they changed their parsing rules on me and silently dropped the plus. I found out most airlines don't have a ticket counter to buy a ticket the old fashioned way! But the premier help can issue tickets. Took me two months to have CS get someone to run a DML to remove my "bad" email address.
It's probably easier to tell them "I lost access to that email, I need to set up a new account". People do this all the time.
On some level, my employer uses emails as the primary key for customer accounts, the baseline identifier which all information is filed under. It's quite ridiculous.
> On some level, my employer uses emails as the primary key for customer accounts, the baseline identifier which all information is filed under. It's quite ridiculous.
I've lost track of the number of places that use the e-mail as an unchangeable identifier. Bonus points for my company liking to change domain names for sport, which just confuses support.
And even big tech companies, who should know better, do this. Like the big blue CDN that's in the middle of half the web's traffic. Who also, for some reason, can't be arsed to send e-mails reliably if you need to change your account.
I did, but the CS agent kept trying to change the email to a new one when I told them I had lost access, and the validation failed because it wanted to send an email to the old address about the email being updated and couldn't. They didn't have the right tools to fix it.
>As someone who deals in breach data this is a simple regex to strip out.
Sure it is, but at least you do get later, post leak, a slight chance find out where leak originated.
Data stealers seldom strip out that +extension part before the selling or otherwise dump it somewhere. And while it's passed on, you get to see address as you gave to that party that had leak. Reason seller don't strip of it is perhaps because they sell by number of unique addresses and while +extension usage is quite rare they make more money when they don't strip it off too.
Information where it leaked can be very useful information to pass leaker at least up till point they have announced they know about the compromise happened. I've done that since turn of century too many times I've lost count already and been quite many times the first to get them know that they had a problem there.
And sure I've received thank you emails that I gave them early head-up info about the issue.
I tried to start doing this. The first site I tried to sign up to said it was an invalid email address.
I would say they could fuck all the way off, but there are legitimate reasons to not let people sign up with an alias (like one person signing up for multiple free trials)
It doesn't have to be literally the service name. Can be any unique alphanumeric suffix you make up randomly. As long as you use a password manager you don't have to remember it.
Indeed, it needs to be more than just the company name if you want it to be useful later. If the email address used is company@example.com, any idiot could guess company. But receiving email to company_wkhx46@example.com is clearly gotta be from them, or they got hacked.
Indeed. But some are easier to change than others. I switched my e-mail provider, and it took all of five minutes to launch the copy of my data. Since I kept the same domain, everyone sending me e-mails didn't notice anything.
With Apple's approach, I'd have to go through each account and move it from something@icloud to something@new-domain.
However, for people who don't want to mess around with custom domain names and e-mail providers, apple's approach is very practical. You just need to tell it to "hide your email" when you register somewhere and you're good to go.
As someone who uses both, I much rather prefer aliases to hide-my-email for the more important stuff. For one, I can choose the email address "username", which I cannot with Apple's solution. Plus, what happens when I move on from Apple to something else?
But aliases can be easily mapped back to your normal email address, unlike Apple's which are opaque. I, too, am afraid of vendor lock-in though. Sadly, couldn't find a good alternative yet
There's no solution to lock-in because there must be some massively shared domain that the email address exists on for the anonymity of the service to properly work. However if you are simply looking for an alternative to Apple, Fastmail offers a masked email service too.
Not sure where you're coming from - my original email address is not being shown in headers, so those seem fairly opaque. Probably depends on your email provider?
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
If you have a nas, I highly recommend you set up a VPN back to your network. It's been a bit of a game changer for me. I don't fiddle around with Dropbox or gdrive anymore, it's just on my nas and it just works. I was even mounting /home from it but that was a bit of overkill and still caused some hassles when I was completely offline- like on an airplane. Vpn has other advantages as well like no longer really having to worry about sketchy wifi networks. It felt annoying and like overkill at first, but I'm never going back to relying on any sync apps again.
> I was even mounting /home from it but that was a bit of overkill and still caused some hassles when I was completely offline- like on an airplane.
I solved this by having /home for desktops/workstations on my NAS, but laptops had their own /home (with the NAS /home mounted somewhere locally). It’s not perfect but was way easier than dealing with the offline case.
I have used this setup for 6 years or so with KeePassXC and it's fine. Just being mindful of not editing stuff on other devices before the first one has had the chance to sync has been enough to avoid pretty much all sync conflicts. I have only had to resolve those a few times so far, iirc my android client was misconfigured at the time or something.
I still recommend Bitwarden for password management for any "laypeople" since it will just work. Also worth noting that the basic functionality is free.
I do something similar with Syncthing, except I use pass and go-pass on my and my spouse's devices. Those utilities store their data in a git repo already by default, but rather than syncing those repos directly, I have set their upstream remotes to local bare repos which is what Syncthing actually syncs. This avoids contention internal to the git repos which I could see causing some problems through normal git operation and the actual sync between devices should be mostly atomic.
(go-)pass automatically does a push/pull due to several operations which keeps the password store in sync and Syncthing does its thing with the bare repos.
This has reduced my maintenance burden on my spouse's devices down to practically zero. The worst case to fix things is I need to `git pull --rebase` in the bare repo. The pass repo format uses individual encrypted files for each password entry (for better or worse) so I have yet to run into a conflict in the same entry.
Why not just push/pull git branches normally? I had previously been doing that but if you want devices to sync that may not always be online, then you must involve an always online git server (which isn't a great idea due to one of pass's weaknesses).
Even when you do get a sync conflict, Syncthing will rename one of the copies and then you can have KeePassXC merge the two files back into one. So that's still pretty much hassle-free.
Probably due to Obsidian's aggressive autosaving, I did cause a syncthing collision my first day by clicking into a note that I was editing on my other device. Kinda wish desktop Obsidian had a save system more like code editors and less like smartphone apps.
I suppose I can avoid the issue with some discipline.
This is the same setup I used for years with no issues, both KeePassXC and multiple Obsidian vaults, along with some other random files and folders. Syncthing is pretty much rock solid. Now I have the KeePassXC database stored on my NAS which is even simpler.
I use a similar setup, but with Onedrive instead of Syncthing (and, before that, Dropbox).
In the almost 10 years I've been running this setup, I think I hit a conflict one single time. I don't quite remember the details, but I think I accidentally edited something in the mobile app, and before saving, edited something else in the desktop app or vice-versa. So it was pretty much my fault.
Other than that, literally never had an issue. Password managers are by their nature mostly reads, and very occasional writes, so it's very hard to put yourself in a situation where conflicts happen, even if you don't pay attention to it. I've made an identical setup for my (fairly savvy but non-technical) fiancee, and she's never hit an issue either. I had to insist a bit for her to get on board, but years later she actually loves using KeePass. She's thanked me multiple times for how convenient it is not having to remember passwords anymore!
One consideration is that Bitwarden seems to not work fully in an offline state the same way your setup would. I constantly try to edit or add a password while offline and can't.
I think this somewhat negates the collision situation though.
That came up during my research and it's one of the reasons I couldn't choose it.
Forcing a read/write right before and after each edit probably simplifies the sync scenario for them but I don't like relying on permanent internet access in my life since it's just not the case.
Unfortunately strongbox was sold a few months ago to a somewhat notorious app firm that has the nasty habit of buying popular apps and adding a whole bunch of telemetry. Not something I'd want in a password app.
I've switched to KeePassium. Not quite as polished UX, but works for me
I'm using KeePassium and SyncTrain for the syncthing integration on iOS.
SyncTrain has been working well, but all the knobs in the advanced folder settings definitely reminds me that I would never recommend it over Dropbox/iCloud/etc to almost anyone, heh.
But as long as I don't run into frequent problems, I like the idea of p2p device syncing over LAN. The phone in my pocket ends up passing around the latest copy since my other devices are almost never on at the same time. It's kinda cute.
No matter how you sync, a Keepass file is a file. I can't be logged out. It will still be on my phone if my house burns down. Every device it's synced to is an additional backup copy.
The Bitwarden client will sometimes log you out if something happens on the server side, which has the potential to make worst case recovery from annoying to impossible. The circular dependency of having my cloud backup password in the vault made me nervous.
Yes, you can back your vault up, but it's a manual step and likely to be forgotten.
1password has better UI/UX and is faster but Bitwarden is cheaper, supports prompting of the master password for specific passwords, and better security options (such as app idle settings instead of just device idle)
I started paying for 1Password years ago when an annual family plan was $48, and to their credit, they've kept me grandfathered in to that price this whole time.
1P is closed source and have had a number of breaches in the past. Bitwarden have had none that I'm aware of, and they're FOSS. I however have been preferring ProtonPass lately (also FOSS) and really like the layout over BW.
Do you have a source for this claim of multiple past breaches? The only one I know of is the Okta breach.
For me they're still firmly in the 'one of the best options out there' category because cross-platform usability is incredibly good imho. I will admit it's been quite a while since I migrated from KeyPass so maybe these other options have improved too.
This is either ignorance or throwing shade at 1Password. Outside of their Okta thing (which didn't impact vaults as far as I'm aware, and was more Okta's fault) they never had a compromise. They are definitely an excellent provider.
I might be that guy soon. I really don't like Bitwarden's extensions, they have clunky UX, are slow and often don't even respect my settings. Autofill is a crapshoot, especially on Android. And they have performance issues with the Firefox and Chrome(-based) extensions so it's not even platform specific.
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.
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.
Bitwarden Families plan is $40 a year and supports up to 6 users. It has TOTP built-in, is open source[1] and has been audited multiple times[2].
The individual plan is $10 a year. I've been a happy user for many years. I converted the last business I was at to exclusively using Bitwarden for Business as well.
I don’t know the “correct” answer, but here’s my answer as someone whose TOTP are split across a YubiKey and Bitwarden: I store TOTP in Bitwarden when the 2FA is required and I just want it to shut up. My Vault is already secured with a passphrase and a YubiKey, both of which are required in sequence, and to actually use a cred once the Vault is authenticated, requires a PIN code (assuming the Vault has been unlocked during this run of the browser, otherwise it requires a master password again).
At that point, frankly, I am gaining nearly nothing from external TOTP for most services. If you have access to my Vault, and were able to fill my password from it, I am already so far beyond pwned that it’s not even worth thinking about. My primary goal is now to get the website to stop moaning at me about how badly I need to configure TOTP (and maybe won’t let me use the service until I do). If it’s truly so critical I MUST have another level of auth after my Vault, it needs to be a physical security key anyway.
I was begging every site ever to let me use TOTP a decade ago, and it was still rare. Oh the irony that I now mostly want sites to stop bugging me for multiple factors again.
2FA most commonly thwarts server-side compromised passwords. An API can leak credentials and an attacker still can’t access the account without the 2FA app, regardless of which app that is. The threat vector it does open you up to are a) a compromised device or b) someone with access to your master password, secret key and email account. Those are both much harder to do and you’re probably screwed in either case unless you use a ubikey or similar device.
How is it possible to have compromised password but not compromised the second factor? I don't understand the theory of leaking not enough factors. What is stopping webmasters from using 100FA?
My Bitwarden account is protected with YubiKey as the 2FA. I then store every other TOTP in Bitwarden right next to the password.
I get amazing convince with this setup, and it’s still technically two factor. To get into my Bitwarden account you need to know both my Bitwarden password and have my yubikey. If you can get into my Bitwarden, then I am owned. But for most of us who are not say, being specifically targeted by state agents, this setup provides good protection with very good user experience.
I self-host through Vaultwarden but I think I miss this. Besides, I feel like paying these guys anyway just for the great product. We use 1Password at $dayjob and it's so primitive by comparison.
Here are the things that get me, and maybe it's because I haven't configured it well yet.
1. On firefox first start-up is slow after unlocking to actually find a password for a site. The interface says, "No logins for xyz.com" for maybe 5 seconds before the login loads.
2. Along those lines when I open it first thing in FF the box for its password isn't focused and I have to click it.
3. The keyboard combo to open it also only works in Chrome.
4. To add a new login I have to go to the site. I haven't figured out how to do it from within the plugin.
5. We get alerts at least once a week about service disruptions but they don't seem to actually affect me.
6. I like Bitwarden's command line tool but I bet 1Password has something at least as good that I haven't found yet.
How is 1password primitive? It does totp. It integrates with TPM in Windows hello. It does sh keys and has its own agent which is a huge help. It's sync is nearly instantaneous. It handles multiple accounts with ease.
The moment you put TOTP in Bitwarden it is no longer a 'second factor'. Pretty bad security advice to be honest. Better to use hardware tokens or a secure phone (with enclave) instead (never SMS though).
In most cases a true second factor isn't really what any involved party cares about.
My bank (I mean, they use SMS, but pretend they use TOTP) just care about not having to spend money on support because I used "password1!" as my password for every account and lose all my money.
I just want to log in to my bank.
If I've got a long, random, unique, securely-stored password, I don't actually care about having a second factor, I'm just enabling TOTP so that I don't have to copy/paste codes from my email or phone.
> If I've got a long, random, unique, securely-stored password, I don't actually care about having a second factor
I'm not comfortable with my entire online identity being protected by a single line of defence which is a company that I'm paying a few dollars a month to. Not having to type 6 digits off a phone is a pretty minor convenience for me.
Do you then avoid syncing any passwords to your phone to avoid having your two factors in the same place? (And similarly, avoid syncing SMS to any devices where you do have passwords.)
If I only store passwords in Bitwarden, not TOTP tokens, then I don't have to pay for it. So, it's an argument for spending less money while being more secure.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those are the same guys who told us we must give them backdoor keys to every encryption algorithm, because nothing can go wrong with it and otherwise terrorists win.
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.
I feel like only in the US is credit monitoring something sold as an optional service.
I got a confirmation mail from System76, because apparently they feel the need to validate my credit card can’t be used without my approval, but my back does this by default…
Yes. US residents' ability to obtain credit (cards, cars, houses) is based on three shadowy for-profit organizations who each keep a secret score on each resident.
One's employment history is not a factor in the score at all (contrast this with Europe).
Furthermore, privacy in the USA is so bad, the leaking of one's personal details which criminals can use to fraudulently obtain credit and ruin said score and possibly also one's finances is a major concern. Hence, "credit monitoring" exists in order to catch this kind of criminal activity in the act, and I don't know, become completely exasperated with the amount of ass pain that dealing with this then causes.
> The data breach compromised highly sensitive 127-page Standard Form 86 (SF 86) (Questionnaire for National Security Positions).[8][18] SF-86 forms contain information about family members, college roommates, foreign contacts, and psychological information. Initially, OPM stated that family members' names were not compromised,[18] but the OPM subsequently confirmed that investigators had "a high degree of confidence that OPM systems containing information related to the background investigations of current, former, and prospective federal government employees, to include U.S. military personnel, and those for whom a federal background investigation was conducted, may have been exfiltrated."
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..)
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)
I've registered (years and years ago) and I get emails saying how many, but to see which emails they want lots of money.
(If I'm wrong their interface is very confusing and I cannot find the free access.)
Specifically it says this:
> Insufficient subscription. Only subscription-free breaches will be returned for this domain.
So I'm able to see 37 email addresses on my domain have been breaches, but I can't see which without paying $22 / month - https://haveibeenpwned.com/Subscription
> Domain search restricted: You don't have an active subscription so you're limited to searching domains with up to 10 breached addresses (excluding addresses in spam lists). Only results for subscription-free breaches are shown below, upgrade your subscription to run a complete domain search. If you believe you're seeing this message in error, make sure you're signing in to the dashboard with the correct email address (check your latest receipt if you're unsure).
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).
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.
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.
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"
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).
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
It does. I just checked mine today. I can see exactly which individual email addresses in my domain where exposed and in which data leak. I have never paid for it.
Interesting. I'd love to see where you're seeing that. I'll go poke at the site a little more.
Edit: When I try to do a domain search I get told:
> Domain search restricted: You don't have an active subscription so you're limited to searching domains with up to 10 breached addresses (excluding addresses in spam lists).
Yep, if you have the good fortune of having many breaches while using companname@example.org, the service requires that either you pay up or you have to guess and check.
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.
In practice, anything that high-profile will be plastered all over every tech news site, twitter, reddit, probably even the news. It would be difficult for MasterCard/Visa to have dataleaks, even just email/pass, fly under the radar (I imagine...)
Oracle tried to cover up a data leak, and it didn't go great. Oracle touches nowhere near as many every-day people as MasterCard does
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.
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.
I've had that experience re: my personalized addresses being used to more closely identify the source and time of a breach. When I start getting spam to one of my personalized addresses I'll usually reach out to the party for whom the address was created to let them know. Usually I get treated like a crank but occasionally I get somebody who understands and appreciates the help.
I use Bitwarden with a Vaultwarden server so I have some familiarity. Bitwarden checks new passwords against HiBP. I'm not aware of functionality where it can retroactively check old email addresses or passwords to see if they're included in a breach.
Ahh, okay. I assume that's a part of the Bitwarden offering, presumably happening server-side. I'm just using their official client w/ a Vaultwarden server.
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.
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.
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.
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?
True, I simplify it a bit based on the capacity of my mail provider. I have like 4 or 5 generic addresses that I give out and use for sending. Sometimes I mix up when sending, but my mail provider (zoho) is pretty decent at keeping track of the addresses anyways.
In a way if I reply, the other party gets upgraded to one of my 5 addresses, so if they send an email to ContosoCoffeeShop@myname.com I might reply from whatever flavour I'm using nowadays or is more appropriate like hello@myname.com
It's like a 3 layer security system, the least privileged get access to one very specific address, if they send me an email which makes sense and I reply, they get upgraded to a bucket. I might sign up directly with a bucket email and skip the most paranoid layer, that's fine.
In general I try to take more care of the newest alias and become more liberal with my older more ruined addresses, alias1@ has like 8 years of signups, while alias5@ has just 1 if any. And I'm sure the list will grow.
Downside is that if there's a leak it's harder to attribute exactly, but at least I can check the recipient to get some kind of hint.
It's more like art than it is a water-tight security protocol. You paint the world with your wacky addresses and occasionally surprise the observant employee with the inverted expectations (usually the name comes before the at)
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.
I meant that you are already paying for those, so being charged by providers to support our hacky email addresses is not a novelty introduced by Troy's service
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.
Reread the parent post more closely. It does not tell them: A) which site nor B) which password.
The parent can log in because they have a map of site<->password. But without either the site or the password, the notification that an email address is compromised is useless.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
They don’t store email addresses with password in the database. That would be way too risky. These are separate databases, so you can lookup your email address, and separately check a password.
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.
I mean, probably should be. But for me, no. Well, not my personal computer anyway. That's a mistake, I know. But corporate computer yes.
So no, I don't think "in this day and age" necessarily. And I believe that the vast majority of "normal" users don't do full drive encryption either. But yes, we should.
Last I looked, windows and Mac installs both push the user to set up bitlocker or FileVault, respectively. You have to actively say no if you don’t want it.
I deliberately dodged there, as you noted. I do not have full disk encryption setup. I know that I'm probably have a very bad day if I come to lose my laptop, etc. I should do this, no doubt.
But I'm not sure. While maybe good password management is starting to soak into common computer usage, I don't think disk encryption is all that common just yet across the average user. It should be. But the average user is just moving to their phone anyway, with face id and encryption by default, instead of maintain their own personal device.
Corporate devices seem to be a bit better in this regard, though.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
Doesn't help. Some accounts are old and may not be in my current PW DB. Or they were memorized, or forgotten.
If the thing suggests the EMAIL (+ associated password) has been compromised for some unknown account then to do a risk assessment I would have find which account it belongs to, not which currently-in-use passwords match the same datasets.
Those are different queries, providing different bits of information.
Here's what I'm suggesting: query all your current passwords against the password API. Then you'll know which of your current password are compromised. Change them.
You don't need to query old passwords, only current passwords. If you're talking about accounts that you've forgotten the password to: then do you care about those accounts? If yes, probably best to do a password reset and set a new password. If you don't care about the account, then why bother?
As for why HIBP doesn't provide an API linking passwords to emails: HIBP has no database that links passwords and emails. So they can't provide any way to query that. They don't want to be in the business of linking passwords to emails.
Spaces are skewing the numbers lower. Remove them from any of those and see the number increase at least an order of magnitude. That “let me login” goes from 0 to 4,714 just by removing spaces (“letmelogin”).
You can check against the API with just the first characters of your hashed password (SHA-1 or NTLM), for example: https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/21BD1 or you can download the entire dataset.
It's not a database, it's just files. And they are hosted by Cloudflare so they can cope with a lot of downloads.
I think he should make the files smaller my removing the second half of the hashes, i.e. reduce it from 40 hex digits to 20. This increases the change of a false positive (i.e. I enter my password, it says it was compromised but it wasn't, it just has the same hash as one that did) from 1 in 10^48 to 1 in 10^24 (per password), but that's still a huge number. (There's less than 10^10 people in the world, they only have a few passwords each). This will approximately halve the download, maybe more because the first half of each hash is more compressible (when sorted) the second half is totally random.
> You are being purposefully obtuse here. HIBP is a very, very well established site with a long history of operating in good faith.
Allowing people to query and someone downloading the entire dataset is normally considered abuse, so being blocked is the expectation here. You're so dense you're bending light around you.
I remember when I was searching the file for some passwords my friends and family use, it took me a while to work out that number too. There are some passwords that many people seem to independently come up with and think must be reasonably secure. I suppose they are to the most basic of attacks.
HaveIBeenPwned has been around for ages and it does not send your password to the server - you can check it with the browser console. It hashes it, sends a range of the hash to the server, server replies with a list of hashes that match that range and it's checked locally for a match.
Still, I would not trust that. The password could be leaked through other means, for example by setting a timer, and exfiltrating fragments of it across future requests.
The website loads some external fonts and spits out many warnings in the console by default. Does not instill confidence in the truly paranoid hacker.
I was going to provide my passwords to any random person on the internet, Troy Hunt might be close to the top of the list, but I think your sentiment is sensible.
I remember searching the dataset being fairly straight forward. It's been a while since I've done it, but I think I just downloaded the text file and then grepped it for hashes of my passwords, but I see people doing much more useful things:
> Passwords are protected with an anonymity model, so we never see them (it's processed in the browser itself), but if you're wary, just check old ones you may suspect.
That could mean one might be able to disconnect from the internet while checking.
It's more practical than you may think. Just needs about 40 GBs right now. I did it a couple years back in a fit of peculiar paranoia, downloaded the full hash list and checked all my KeePass-stored passwords at that time against it.
The above post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840724 links to 71.3 KiB of data; since it's a 5-nybble prefix (20 bits) we may easily estimate a size of 71.3 GiB assuming that's a representative sample. Not unfeasible nowadays, but it seems you do have to make separate requests and would presumably be rate-limited on them.
If you only download the hash pages corresponding to passwords you hold, even supposing that everything else is fully compromised, an attacker would have to reverse a couple thousand SHA-1 hashes, dodge hash collisions, and brute-force with the results (yes, yes: arson, murder and jaywalking) to pwn you.
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
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.
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.
Only if you want to search by account. If you want to search by password, it's free. You can query all your passwords to see which ones are breached, and change those.
> Authorisation is required for all APIs that enable searching HIBP by email address or domain, namely retrieving all breaches for an account, retrieving all pastes for an account, retrieving all breached email addresses for a domain and retrieving all stealer log domains for a breached email addresses. There is no authorisation required for the free Pwned Passwords API.
And searching by account wouldn't tell you anything useful. It would just say "Synthient Credential Stuffing Threat Data". It wouldn't tell you what password to change, because HIBP doesn't know what site the password(s) that it found in "Synthient Credential Stuffing Threat Data" were associated with, and HIBP doesn't maintain a database linking passwords to emails.
Sorry, I missed that you were talking about stealer logs. This specific credential dump of 2B emails wasn't a stealer log, so stealer log info will not tell you anything about this specific credential dump.
You're right that the API for stealer log info isn't free.
However, the dashboard can provide you information about stealer logs for free.
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!
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.
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...
Speaking for myself, the "blast radius" of my email address is some 600+ accounts... (just looking in my password manager). The chances of me sitting down and closing every single one are non-existent. Many won't even have the luxury of having diligently tracked their login accounts in a password manager either.
Just having a family, kids, bills, schools, jobs, credit cards, banks, investments, insurance, shopping etc etc - the number of accounts many of us pick up can easily get into the hundreds.
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
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:
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Hashing is so fast that you can hand-wave it away as zero cost relative to the time taken to read such a large amount of data. Also, you only have to do it once for the whole input, which means that it's O(n) time where 'n' is the gigabytes of passwords you have.
Sorting is going to need about O(n * log n) time even if it's entirely in memory, but more if it has to spool to disk storage then it'll take much longer than the hashing step.
PS: I just realised that 2 billion passwords is not actually that much data -- only 40 GB of hashes -- that's well within the range of what's "easy" to sort in-memory by simply creating an array of hashes that size and calling a standard library sort function.
What other algorithms have you used?
I'm really interested in big data streams.
I would like to hear not only successful solutions, but also failed ones.
Have you tried using Bloom filters?
Is it possible to merge shards using the Min-Heap algorithm?
Algorithm choice depends on what you're optimising for. The discussion a few years ago was dozens of small web servers handling a large volume of password change traffic (10K/sec!) needing a cheap centralised service for verifying against "known bad" passwords. On a cloud hosting platform, the optimal solution is a blob store of sorted binary hashes with a small (~1 MB) precomputed index stored in-memory in the web server that lets you query the main store with 1 or at most 2 reads. This is an optimal "one round trip" request, and the per-server overhead at the front end is negligible.
However, that approach assumes a slowly changing list where you don't mind that there's a delay of maybe a few hours to merge in a new list. Large lists of password leaks are infrequent, so this works fine for this usecase.
A two-layer approach with a small frequently updated hash set on top of the large infrequently built sorted list is more generally applicable to a wider range of problems.
Bloom filters are probabilistic, and aren't much faster to create than a sorted list. They also require 'k' random reads to test, where k is a small constant such as 3 to 5. If the filter is large (gigabytes), then you can't efficiently load it into many front-end web servers. If you query it over the network as a blob, you need 3-5x the I/O operations. You can wrap it in an API service that holds it in-memory, but that's still much more complex than simply storing and querying a blob in S3 or Azure Storage directly.
"Clever" algorithms like min-heaps or whatever are likely not worth the trouble. My decade-old PC can sort 2 billion hashes in about 30 seconds using the Rust "Rayon" crate. There are cloud VMs available for about $2/hr that have about a terabyte of RAM that could sort any reasonable sized list (10s of billions) in a few minutes at most.
The original article mention a week of 80 vCores of SQL Hyperscale, which is about $6,000 at PayG rates!
Sure, developer time is expensive, blah blah blah, but waiting a week ain't cheap either, and these days an AI can bang out the code for a password file hashing and sorting utility in a minute or two.
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.
All fair points and obviously well thought out by knowledgeable people. I approach problem solving the same way, accounting for staff familiarity with tools, not just the wall-clock time taken for some esoteric approach.
My observation is that in the last year or so the relative weight of these contributions has shifted massively because of AI code authoring.
It’s so fast and easy to whip up a few hundred lines of code with something like Gemini Pro 2.5 that I got it to make me a sorting benchmark tool just so I’d have a data point for a comment in this thread! I never would have had the time years ago.
For relatively “small” and isolated problems like password hash lookup tables, it’s amazing what you can do in mere hours with AI assistance.
If I was approaching this same problem just two years ago I would have picked SQL Hyperscale too, for the same(ish) reasons.
Now? I feel like many more avenues have been opened up…
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
When you reply, any sensible system will use the address you received it at. Fastmail does this, as do many others (I used Thunderbird for many years, possibly with an extension to do that). To send an email from scratch you just type the address you want in the from field or select from a list. At no point is there any need to create specific addresses, as the catch-all means all addresses are already valid.
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?
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!
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?
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...
They're hard to explain to users, the implementations want to lock people to specific devices and phones, you can't tell someone a passkey nor type it in easily over a serial link or between two devices which don't have electronic connectivity.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
More importantly, since HIBP sells monitoring services to 1Password, if they were maliciously collecting this data they would be immediately sued to oblivion.
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.
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.
> 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.
It was infuriating to me when normal_email+site_name@gmail.com stopped working for registration on some sites.
Fucked up my Costco registration, a variety of other things.
This sort of quasi-pseudonymity is required for basic security/privacy in 2025; It's the only way to get a handle on who's allowed to send you email, since we've never bothered to fix spoofing or impose a cost on spam. I've been trying to use it since Sneakemail was a free service back in the pre-Gmail days.
Many spammers will strip the +xxxx out of the emails anyway to not reveal the source of their data so it doesn't matter too much really.
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 “+”.
I'd be really surprised if Gmail's + behaviour isn't so well known by spammers that they just strip them off?
Conversely, I'd assume this pattern is used rarely enough for spammers to even bother fighting it.
But I've seen service providers who insisted on creating some account with a valid email who wouldn't accept a `+` it in their forms...
My favorite was that I could sign-up with the + address but couldn't sign-in. And the support desk rejected that + address too.
The phone support person was confused about that symbol too, what an odd email.
This is one of the reasons I switched to a different provider using a custom domain. I can make new addresses in any format I want. There's zero risk of a spammer stripping them down to a base address for the primary account. They also don't get rejected by broken validators.
What’s your plan for when you no longer own your custom domain (think bus factor)? Someone else register your domain and now has access to all your accounts.
Everyone has their own risk profiles, mine assumes I retain control over my domains and emails. I prepay for them several months in advance to make sure I don't lose ownership. any service provider worth their salt will have a human factor for customer support who can help you if any such issues show up.
Thank you for expanding. Sure you can prepay up to a certain extent. Eventually your domain will be available to others for purchase and therefore your accounts will become vulnerable. Maybe this isn’t an issue if in the worst situation you’re not around but if this could cause chaos for your friends and family I would suggest taking it into account.
yep, i use fastmail with a custom domain. i have a catch all email set up, so i just register any account on sitename.com as "sitename@mydomain" and it all gets sorted into a catch all folder. I can then run rules if i want it to go into a certain category like "bills" or just straight to the garbage.
Not sure about normalizing recipients' emails but some are definitely aware of it because I've seen spam that asked to "reply back to defi.n.it.ely.not.shady+email@gmail.com" or something.
even better: those will be spam guaranteed and can just be filtered by rule then
With Gmail, also note that firstname.lastname@gmail.com is equivalent to firstnamelastname@gmail.com or fi.rs.tn.am.el.as.tn.am.e@gmail.com
As some other comment suggested, these rules are easy to tackle by motivated spammers.
If they were motivated, they wouldn't work as spammers.
Some spammers make obscene amounts of money. CEO of Fortune 100 money.
10% of all of Meta's income is from scammers.
I see what ya did there, you get an upvote.
The downside is that https://haveibeenpwned.com/ can only find "exact email" addressed, as in, you must search for myname@gmail.com, myname+service1@gmail.com, etc.
I do this as well, but there are a number of service providers that just do not handle subaddressing at all. Like creating an account will result in never receiving a confirmation or verification code because the system failed to parse the address.
I've started using grouped aliases instead for a bunch of things.
Careful with this method. I was unable to purchase plane tickets from Southwest or even change my email address because they changed their parsing rules on me and silently dropped the plus. I found out most airlines don't have a ticket counter to buy a ticket the old fashioned way! But the premier help can issue tickets. Took me two months to have CS get someone to run a DML to remove my "bad" email address.
It's probably easier to tell them "I lost access to that email, I need to set up a new account". People do this all the time.
On some level, my employer uses emails as the primary key for customer accounts, the baseline identifier which all information is filed under. It's quite ridiculous.
> On some level, my employer uses emails as the primary key for customer accounts, the baseline identifier which all information is filed under. It's quite ridiculous.
I've lost track of the number of places that use the e-mail as an unchangeable identifier. Bonus points for my company liking to change domain names for sport, which just confuses support.
And even big tech companies, who should know better, do this. Like the big blue CDN that's in the middle of half the web's traffic. Who also, for some reason, can't be arsed to send e-mails reliably if you need to change your account.
I did, but the CS agent kept trying to change the email to a new one when I told them I had lost access, and the validation failed because it wanted to send an email to the old address about the email being updated and couldn't. They didn't have the right tools to fix it.
Had to get an engineer involved.
As someone who deals in breach data this is a simple regex to strip out.
>As someone who deals in breach data this is a simple regex to strip out.
Sure it is, but at least you do get later, post leak, a slight chance find out where leak originated.
Data stealers seldom strip out that +extension part before the selling or otherwise dump it somewhere. And while it's passed on, you get to see address as you gave to that party that had leak. Reason seller don't strip of it is perhaps because they sell by number of unique addresses and while +extension usage is quite rare they make more money when they don't strip it off too.
Information where it leaked can be very useful information to pass leaker at least up till point they have announced they know about the compromise happened. I've done that since turn of century too many times I've lost count already and been quite many times the first to get them know that they had a problem there.
And sure I've received thank you emails that I gave them early head-up info about the issue.
I tried to start doing this. The first site I tried to sign up to said it was an invalid email address.
I would say they could fuck all the way off, but there are legitimate reasons to not let people sign up with an alias (like one person signing up for multiple free trials)
Right. Because it's oh so difficult to set up a separate e-mail account with one of the free providers.
I have such a hard time understanding why people think e-mail addresses are some kind of special thing hard to come by.
Anyone who’s looked at breach data knows to try yourname+service for any service.
This does help in filtering spam though
It doesn't have to be literally the service name. Can be any unique alphanumeric suffix you make up randomly. As long as you use a password manager you don't have to remember it.
Indeed, it needs to be more than just the company name if you want it to be useful later. If the email address used is company@example.com, any idiot could guess company. But receiving email to company_wkhx46@example.com is clearly gotta be from them, or they got hacked.
That's why you have to salt the + portion (look up an old email from the service if you forgot the alias).
> Anyone who’s looked at breach data knows to try yourname+service for any service
Since we're all using a unique password for every service - <cough> we are doing that, aren't we (!!) - then how does that help?
(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
And one day you've had it with Apple's latest user-hostile shenanigans and switch to Linux. What now? Do you just keep paying for iCloud+ forever?
In my experience the overwhelming majority of services permit me to change my email address.
Of course. But I have hundreds of user accounts, as probably many people do. I would not enjoy changing all those email addresses.
wouldnt this be the case for any vendor you choose?
Indeed. But some are easier to change than others. I switched my e-mail provider, and it took all of five minutes to launch the copy of my data. Since I kept the same domain, everyone sending me e-mails didn't notice anything.
With Apple's approach, I'd have to go through each account and move it from something@icloud to something@new-domain.
However, for people who don't want to mess around with custom domain names and e-mail providers, apple's approach is very practical. You just need to tell it to "hide your email" when you register somewhere and you're good to go.
yes
As someone who uses both, I much rather prefer aliases to hide-my-email for the more important stuff. For one, I can choose the email address "username", which I cannot with Apple's solution. Plus, what happens when I move on from Apple to something else?
But aliases can be easily mapped back to your normal email address, unlike Apple's which are opaque. I, too, am afraid of vendor lock-in though. Sadly, couldn't find a good alternative yet
There's no solution to lock-in because there must be some massively shared domain that the email address exists on for the anonymity of the service to properly work. However if you are simply looking for an alternative to Apple, Fastmail offers a masked email service too.
Not sure where you're coming from - my original email address is not being shown in headers, so those seem fairly opaque. Probably depends on your email provider?
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.
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.
> 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.
did exactly same. the only difference is that i use compromised emails to train spam filter
> 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
+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.
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.
If you have a nas, I highly recommend you set up a VPN back to your network. It's been a bit of a game changer for me. I don't fiddle around with Dropbox or gdrive anymore, it's just on my nas and it just works. I was even mounting /home from it but that was a bit of overkill and still caused some hassles when I was completely offline- like on an airplane. Vpn has other advantages as well like no longer really having to worry about sketchy wifi networks. It felt annoying and like overkill at first, but I'm never going back to relying on any sync apps again.
> I was even mounting /home from it but that was a bit of overkill and still caused some hassles when I was completely offline- like on an airplane.
I solved this by having /home for desktops/workstations on my NAS, but laptops had their own /home (with the NAS /home mounted somewhere locally). It’s not perfect but was way easier than dealing with the offline case.
Yes, I'm using Tailscale, and you're basically always on your home network. Very convenient.
I have used this setup for 6 years or so with KeePassXC and it's fine. Just being mindful of not editing stuff on other devices before the first one has had the chance to sync has been enough to avoid pretty much all sync conflicts. I have only had to resolve those a few times so far, iirc my android client was misconfigured at the time or something.
I still recommend Bitwarden for password management for any "laypeople" since it will just work. Also worth noting that the basic functionality is free.
I do something similar with Syncthing, except I use pass and go-pass on my and my spouse's devices. Those utilities store their data in a git repo already by default, but rather than syncing those repos directly, I have set their upstream remotes to local bare repos which is what Syncthing actually syncs. This avoids contention internal to the git repos which I could see causing some problems through normal git operation and the actual sync between devices should be mostly atomic.
(go-)pass automatically does a push/pull due to several operations which keeps the password store in sync and Syncthing does its thing with the bare repos.
This has reduced my maintenance burden on my spouse's devices down to practically zero. The worst case to fix things is I need to `git pull --rebase` in the bare repo. The pass repo format uses individual encrypted files for each password entry (for better or worse) so I have yet to run into a conflict in the same entry.
Why not just push/pull git branches normally? I had previously been doing that but if you want devices to sync that may not always be online, then you must involve an always online git server (which isn't a great idea due to one of pass's weaknesses).
Even when you do get a sync conflict, Syncthing will rename one of the copies and then you can have KeePassXC merge the two files back into one. So that's still pretty much hassle-free.
Probably due to Obsidian's aggressive autosaving, I did cause a syncthing collision my first day by clicking into a note that I was editing on my other device. Kinda wish desktop Obsidian had a save system more like code editors and less like smartphone apps.
I suppose I can avoid the issue with some discipline.
This is the same setup I used for years with no issues, both KeePassXC and multiple Obsidian vaults, along with some other random files and folders. Syncthing is pretty much rock solid. Now I have the KeePassXC database stored on my NAS which is even simpler.
The cool thing with KeePass is that each client is also a local backup. It's pretty neat.
I use a similar setup, but with Onedrive instead of Syncthing (and, before that, Dropbox).
In the almost 10 years I've been running this setup, I think I hit a conflict one single time. I don't quite remember the details, but I think I accidentally edited something in the mobile app, and before saving, edited something else in the desktop app or vice-versa. So it was pretty much my fault.
Other than that, literally never had an issue. Password managers are by their nature mostly reads, and very occasional writes, so it's very hard to put yourself in a situation where conflicts happen, even if you don't pay attention to it. I've made an identical setup for my (fairly savvy but non-technical) fiancee, and she's never hit an issue either. I had to insist a bit for her to get on board, but years later she actually loves using KeePass. She's thanked me multiple times for how convenient it is not having to remember passwords anymore!
Not sure about Obsidian sync, but for Bitwarden you can self-host Vaultwarden.
> Now that I'm not only using a Macbook and iPhone, I've been looking for cross-platform solutions.
1password works in all the places, it's just not open source.
One consideration is that Bitwarden seems to not work fully in an offline state the same way your setup would. I constantly try to edit or add a password while offline and can't. I think this somewhat negates the collision situation though.
That came up during my research and it's one of the reasons I couldn't choose it.
Forcing a read/write right before and after each edit probably simplifies the sync scenario for them but I don't like relying on permanent internet access in my life since it's just not the case.
I have almost the exact same setup! Hit me up if you have any Qs as I've been a happy user of this for a few years now.
I originally started using Bitwarden to achieve sync across Mac, Windows, and Linux machines, along with all major browser platforms. It's been great!
You can throw a keepass vault on OneDrive or Dropbox and it works just fine everywhere. Not fiddly at all except Linux and OneDrive support.
Which device can you not use bitwarden on?
strongbox is a reasonable app for iOS and you can set it up for sftp to your main self hosted server.
Unfortunately strongbox was sold a few months ago to a somewhat notorious app firm that has the nasty habit of buying popular apps and adding a whole bunch of telemetry. Not something I'd want in a password app.
I've switched to KeePassium. Not quite as polished UX, but works for me
I'm using KeePassium and SyncTrain for the syncthing integration on iOS.
SyncTrain has been working well, but all the knobs in the advanced folder settings definitely reminds me that I would never recommend it over Dropbox/iCloud/etc to almost anyone, heh.
But as long as I don't run into frequent problems, I like the idea of p2p device syncing over LAN. The phone in my pocket ends up passing around the latest copy since my other devices are almost never on at the same time. It's kinda cute.
> Not quite as polished UX
Huh, this is interesting… If you have any specific UX pain points, feel free to reach out.
Why not just run a vaultwarden instance at that point?
No matter how you sync, a Keepass file is a file. I can't be logged out. It will still be on my phone if my house burns down. Every device it's synced to is an additional backup copy.
The Bitwarden client will sometimes log you out if something happens on the server side, which has the potential to make worst case recovery from annoying to impossible. The circular dependency of having my cloud backup password in the vault made me nervous.
Yes, you can back your vault up, but it's a manual step and likely to be forgotten.
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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.
1password has better UI/UX and is faster but Bitwarden is cheaper, supports prompting of the master password for specific passwords, and better security options (such as app idle settings instead of just device idle)
I just trialled it but got a refund
I started paying for 1Password years ago when an annual family plan was $48, and to their credit, they've kept me grandfathered in to that price this whole time.
I'm not saying 1Password is expensive, but Bitwarden is only $10 a year
1P is closed source and have had a number of breaches in the past. Bitwarden have had none that I'm aware of, and they're FOSS. I however have been preferring ProtonPass lately (also FOSS) and really like the layout over BW.
> and have had a number of breaches in the past
Do you have a source for this claim of multiple past breaches? The only one I know of is the Okta breach.
For me they're still firmly in the 'one of the best options out there' category because cross-platform usability is incredibly good imho. I will admit it's been quite a while since I migrated from KeyPass so maybe these other options have improved too.
This is either ignorance or throwing shade at 1Password. Outside of their Okta thing (which didn't impact vaults as far as I'm aware, and was more Okta's fault) they never had a compromise. They are definitely an excellent provider.
I might be that guy soon. I really don't like Bitwarden's extensions, they have clunky UX, are slow and often don't even respect my settings. Autofill is a crapshoot, especially on Android. And they have performance issues with the Firefox and Chrome(-based) extensions so it's not even platform specific.
Same experience here
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.
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.
Bitwarden Families plan is $40 a year and supports up to 6 users. It has TOTP built-in, is open source[1] and has been audited multiple times[2].
The individual plan is $10 a year. I've been a happy user for many years. I converted the last business I was at to exclusively using Bitwarden for Business as well.
[1] https://github.com/bitwarden/
[2] https://bitwarden.com/help/is-bitwarden-audited/
Bitwarden supports TOTP too, even though it's not entirely obvious from the UI.
TOTP inside a password manager doesn't make much sense to me. What's the point of two factor auth if both factors are stored together?
I don’t know the “correct” answer, but here’s my answer as someone whose TOTP are split across a YubiKey and Bitwarden: I store TOTP in Bitwarden when the 2FA is required and I just want it to shut up. My Vault is already secured with a passphrase and a YubiKey, both of which are required in sequence, and to actually use a cred once the Vault is authenticated, requires a PIN code (assuming the Vault has been unlocked during this run of the browser, otherwise it requires a master password again).
At that point, frankly, I am gaining nearly nothing from external TOTP for most services. If you have access to my Vault, and were able to fill my password from it, I am already so far beyond pwned that it’s not even worth thinking about. My primary goal is now to get the website to stop moaning at me about how badly I need to configure TOTP (and maybe won’t let me use the service until I do). If it’s truly so critical I MUST have another level of auth after my Vault, it needs to be a physical security key anyway.
I was begging every site ever to let me use TOTP a decade ago, and it was still rare. Oh the irony that I now mostly want sites to stop bugging me for multiple factors again.
2FA most commonly thwarts server-side compromised passwords. An API can leak credentials and an attacker still can’t access the account without the 2FA app, regardless of which app that is. The threat vector it does open you up to are a) a compromised device or b) someone with access to your master password, secret key and email account. Those are both much harder to do and you’re probably screwed in either case unless you use a ubikey or similar device.
How is it possible to have compromised password but not compromised the second factor? I don't understand the theory of leaking not enough factors. What is stopping webmasters from using 100FA?
My Bitwarden account is protected with YubiKey as the 2FA. I then store every other TOTP in Bitwarden right next to the password.
I get amazing convince with this setup, and it’s still technically two factor. To get into my Bitwarden account you need to know both my Bitwarden password and have my yubikey. If you can get into my Bitwarden, then I am owned. But for most of us who are not say, being specifically targeted by state agents, this setup provides good protection with very good user experience.
Bingo. You need to use a different totp.
Why do we need a separate 2FA TOTP app for anything? :| I have a feeling too many people have no idea what TOTP is, and how easy it is to implement.
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> Bitwarden
Best when paid for so you can do 2FA with TOTP codes!
I self-host through Vaultwarden but I think I miss this. Besides, I feel like paying these guys anyway just for the great product. We use 1Password at $dayjob and it's so primitive by comparison.
What is lacking in 1Password by comparison? I pay for a family plan but maybe I should switch next year.
Here are the things that get me, and maybe it's because I haven't configured it well yet.
1. On firefox first start-up is slow after unlocking to actually find a password for a site. The interface says, "No logins for xyz.com" for maybe 5 seconds before the login loads.
2. Along those lines when I open it first thing in FF the box for its password isn't focused and I have to click it.
3. The keyboard combo to open it also only works in Chrome.
4. To add a new login I have to go to the site. I haven't figured out how to do it from within the plugin.
5. We get alerts at least once a week about service disruptions but they don't seem to actually affect me.
6. I like Bitwarden's command line tool but I bet 1Password has something at least as good that I haven't found yet.
How is 1password primitive? It does totp. It integrates with TPM in Windows hello. It does sh keys and has its own agent which is a huge help. It's sync is nearly instantaneous. It handles multiple accounts with ease.
TOTP works with vaultwarden.
Oh cool! I'll have to dig into it.
Yes definitely. Works great.
1Password supports TOTP?
Really? I find it to be the complete opposite.
The moment you put TOTP in Bitwarden it is no longer a 'second factor'. Pretty bad security advice to be honest. Better to use hardware tokens or a secure phone (with enclave) instead (never SMS though).
In most cases a true second factor isn't really what any involved party cares about.
My bank (I mean, they use SMS, but pretend they use TOTP) just care about not having to spend money on support because I used "password1!" as my password for every account and lose all my money.
I just want to log in to my bank.
If I've got a long, random, unique, securely-stored password, I don't actually care about having a second factor, I'm just enabling TOTP so that I don't have to copy/paste codes from my email or phone.
> If I've got a long, random, unique, securely-stored password, I don't actually care about having a second factor
I'm not comfortable with my entire online identity being protected by a single line of defence which is a company that I'm paying a few dollars a month to. Not having to type 6 digits off a phone is a pretty minor convenience for me.
Do you then avoid syncing any passwords to your phone to avoid having your two factors in the same place? (And similarly, avoid syncing SMS to any devices where you do have passwords.)
I think it’s mostly nice for places that require TOTP but don’t actually rate carrying around/plugging in a yubikey for.
It costs $10/year, so there's really no reason to not pay for it.
I have two reasons not to pay for it: 1) Aegis is free. 2) I rather not have my second factor be stored in the same database as my first factor.
You can just not store the TOTP tokens in Bitwarden? I don’t see how this is an argument against.
If I only store passwords in Bitwarden, not TOTP tokens, then I don't have to pay for it. So, it's an argument for spending less money while being more secure.
I’ve never paid and Bitwarden does 2FA/TOTP for me?
Is this sarcasm?
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.
So happy to not have to remember whether the [firstname][lastname][number] password ended with a 4 or 5
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.
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!"
> 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.)
They probably block non-U.S. IP addresses since it's for persons in the U.S.
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.
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.
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.
They do not want to have such a list as it makes them a target.
What they do have is a searchable password list not connected to any usernames.
*searchable list of password hashes
> 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.
I was in the military. China stole my freaking DNA profile. I've given up on worrying about this stuff.
Gonna be a very weird day for you when China's clone army invades us.
If nothing else, I guess one should at least be kinda proud that of all stolen DNAs, yours is the one they end up making a clone army out of.
5,000,000 Kulahans invading America would not be very effective thus I have defeated China myself, no thanks are necessary.
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.
Those are the same guys who told us we must give them backdoor keys to every encryption algorithm, because nothing can go wrong with it and otherwise terrorists win.
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.
DNA, blood type, fingerprints, and anything else on your background checks...
They even got my kids social security numbers.
The number of years I got "free credit monitoring" I can pass it down to my children . . .
I feel like only in the US is credit monitoring something sold as an optional service.
I got a confirmation mail from System76, because apparently they feel the need to validate my credit card can’t be used without my approval, but my back does this by default…
Yes. US residents' ability to obtain credit (cards, cars, houses) is based on three shadowy for-profit organizations who each keep a secret score on each resident.
One's employment history is not a factor in the score at all (contrast this with Europe).
Furthermore, privacy in the USA is so bad, the leaking of one's personal details which criminals can use to fraudulently obtain credit and ruin said score and possibly also one's finances is a major concern. Hence, "credit monitoring" exists in order to catch this kind of criminal activity in the act, and I don't know, become completely exasperated with the amount of ass pain that dealing with this then causes.
Credit monitoring has nothing to do with Credit Cards.
Most banks in America indeed do offer (for free) the option to be notified for each transactions if you want.
DNA is actually almost impossible to keep secret if someone really wants it - you basically shed your entire DNA every time you touch anything
Wow! Didn't hear about this. What test did you get done? I'm hoping it wasn't whole genome or exome?
It wasn't an actual DNA test, but the military takes blood samples of every recruit. I'm referring to this hack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
edit: the relevant text is below
> The data breach compromised highly sensitive 127-page Standard Form 86 (SF 86) (Questionnaire for National Security Positions).[8][18] SF-86 forms contain information about family members, college roommates, foreign contacts, and psychological information. Initially, OPM stated that family members' names were not compromised,[18] but the OPM subsequently confirmed that investigators had "a high degree of confidence that OPM systems containing information related to the background investigations of current, former, and prospective federal government employees, to include U.S. military personnel, and those for whom a federal background investigation was conducted, may have been exfiltrated."
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..)
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)
I've registered (years and years ago) and I get emails saying how many, but to see which emails they want lots of money.
(If I'm wrong their interface is very confusing and I cannot find the free access.)
Specifically it says this:
> Insufficient subscription. Only subscription-free breaches will be returned for this domain.
So I'm able to see 37 email addresses on my domain have been breaches, but I can't see which without paying $22 / month - https://haveibeenpwned.com/Subscription
> Domain search restricted: You don't have an active subscription so you're limited to searching domains with up to 10 breached addresses (excluding addresses in spam lists). Only results for subscription-free breaches are shown below, upgrade your subscription to run a complete domain search. If you believe you're seeing this message in error, make sure you're signing in to the dashboard with the correct email address (check your latest receipt if you're unsure).
Quoting Troy from a thread beneath the article:
> The easiest approach in that case is to take out the subscription, then immediately cancel it. It'll still last the full month, more here: https://support.haveibeenpwned.com/hc/en-au/articles/7707041...
I feel you. The aggregate email breach list just feels like a rainbow table at this point.
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??
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).
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.
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.
[dead]
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
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"
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).
Those CISOs / CTOs / CIOs attached to those companies do not want to be in the news.
So by this point, if anyone does anything naughty online they could just pin it on an hacker using their identity, no?
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.
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.
freeze your credit at the three major companaies.
[dead]
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
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.
In that case he could just store the emails that haven’t been compromised yet.
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.
Same here
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.
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.
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.
I have 15 pwned email addresses. It's free for under 10.
But I can't find the old list of what address was affected where. I only see my own address.
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.
It does. I just checked mine today. I can see exactly which individual email addresses in my domain where exposed and in which data leak. I have never paid for it.
Interesting. I'd love to see where you're seeing that. I'll go poke at the site a little more.
Edit: When I try to do a domain search I get told:
> Domain search restricted: You don't have an active subscription so you're limited to searching domains with up to 10 breached addresses (excluding addresses in spam lists).
My domain has 11 breached addresses.
I log in. Click on Business -> Domains. Then click on the looking glass under "Actions" on my domain. I can there see all my addresses an Pwned Sites.
But I think you are right, because I only have 3 breached addresses under my domain (I do see the 10 addresses wording under subscriptions)
Yep, if you have the good fortune of having many breaches while using companname@example.org, the service requires that either you pay up or you have to guess and check.
I understand, but it's frustrating.
It is only free if you have fewer than 10 pwned addresses.
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.
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.
In theory, I agree.
In practice, anything that high-profile will be plastered all over every tech news site, twitter, reddit, probably even the news. It would be difficult for MasterCard/Visa to have dataleaks, even just email/pass, fly under the radar (I imagine...)
Oracle tried to cover up a data leak, and it didn't go great. Oracle touches nowhere near as many every-day people as MasterCard does
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...
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.
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.
I've had that experience re: my personalized addresses being used to more closely identify the source and time of a breach. When I start getting spam to one of my personalized addresses I'll usually reach out to the party for whom the address was created to let them know. Usually I get treated like a crank but occasionally I get somebody who understands and appreciates the help.
My password manager (Bitwarden) does that automatically.
I use Bitwarden with a Vaultwarden server so I have some familiarity. Bitwarden checks new passwords against HiBP. I'm not aware of functionality where it can retroactively check old email addresses or passwords to see if they're included in a breach.
It's under Reports: https://bitwarden.com/help/reports/
Ahh, okay. I assume that's a part of the Bitwarden offering, presumably happening server-side. I'm just using their official client w/ a Vaultwarden server.
It is also available in the Vaultwarden web interface (which is just a rebranded Bitwarden web interface).
enpass.io does this automatically if you selected the option.
Just assume they have all been exposed.
Email addresses are not secrets under any stretch of the meaning of that word.
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.
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.
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.
You need a domain, and possibly a paid mail provider with catch all support.
So cost was always part of this strategy
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?
True, I simplify it a bit based on the capacity of my mail provider. I have like 4 or 5 generic addresses that I give out and use for sending. Sometimes I mix up when sending, but my mail provider (zoho) is pretty decent at keeping track of the addresses anyways.
In a way if I reply, the other party gets upgraded to one of my 5 addresses, so if they send an email to ContosoCoffeeShop@myname.com I might reply from whatever flavour I'm using nowadays or is more appropriate like hello@myname.com
It's like a 3 layer security system, the least privileged get access to one very specific address, if they send me an email which makes sense and I reply, they get upgraded to a bucket. I might sign up directly with a bucket email and skip the most paranoid layer, that's fine.
In general I try to take more care of the newest alias and become more liberal with my older more ruined addresses, alias1@ has like 8 years of signups, while alias5@ has just 1 if any. And I'm sure the list will grow.
Downside is that if there's a leak it's harder to attribute exactly, but at least I can check the recipient to get some kind of hint.
It's more like art than it is a water-tight security protocol. You paint the world with your wacky addresses and occasionally surprise the observant employee with the inverted expectations (usually the name comes before the at)
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
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.
Yeah I get it.
I meant that you are already paying for those, so being charged by providers to support our hacky email addresses is not a novelty introduced by Troy's service
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.
If you don’t know which web site uses a particular password, how do you ever login to that website?
Reread the parent post more closely. It does not tell them: A) which site nor B) which password.
The parent can log in because they have a map of site<->password. But without either the site or the password, the notification that an email address is compromised is useless.
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.
You'd think spotify as a mature company would have had obligations to report this stuff!
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.
> 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:
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.
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.
They don’t store email addresses with password in the database. That would be way too risky. These are separate databases, so you can lookup your email address, and separately check a password.
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.
and root disk encryption, unless you have some alternative method set up.
That's the default in this day and age, no?
I mean, probably should be. But for me, no. Well, not my personal computer anyway. That's a mistake, I know. But corporate computer yes.
So no, I don't think "in this day and age" necessarily. And I believe that the vast majority of "normal" users don't do full drive encryption either. But yes, we should.
Last I looked, windows and Mac installs both push the user to set up bitlocker or FileVault, respectively. You have to actively say no if you don’t want it.
I deliberately dodged there, as you noted. I do not have full disk encryption setup. I know that I'm probably have a very bad day if I come to lose my laptop, etc. I should do this, no doubt.
But I'm not sure. While maybe good password management is starting to soak into common computer usage, I don't think disk encryption is all that common just yet across the average user. It should be. But the average user is just moving to their phone anyway, with face id and encryption by default, instead of maintain their own personal device.
Corporate devices seem to be a bit better in this regard, though.
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.
> 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.
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).
Letting me check my passwords one at a time is like letting me check my grains of rice individually for poison before eating.
Use a tool
https://monitor.mozilla.org/
https://watchtower.1password.com/
https://bitwarden.com/help/reports/#exposed-passwords-report
There is also an API
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.
> 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.
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?
You buy you email in and then the result it a website that got breached. Together this should give you enough information.
> 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.
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.
Btw they are not storing more info along the email address, because that would be way too risky. Just imagine the HIBP database being leaked.
Also, they don’t always know where your info has leaked. Some datasets are aggregates.
This information is given for each of the leaked incidents. Troy also explains this in his blog post.
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.
Same here: reset on first beach (ROFB), but on subsequent ones only if it is no collection, eg a new infostealer breach.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords
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?
You can use the API to check all of your passwords. Then you'll know the security state of all of your passwords.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3
Doesn't help. Some accounts are old and may not be in my current PW DB. Or they were memorized, or forgotten.
If the thing suggests the EMAIL (+ associated password) has been compromised for some unknown account then to do a risk assessment I would have find which account it belongs to, not which currently-in-use passwords match the same datasets.
Those are different queries, providing different bits of information.
Of course it helps.
How's this for making it actionable:
Regardless of whether or not someone can associate it with your email, if your password has been seen in the wild, change it.
There you go.
Here's what I'm suggesting: query all your current passwords against the password API. Then you'll know which of your current password are compromised. Change them.
You don't need to query old passwords, only current passwords. If you're talking about accounts that you've forgotten the password to: then do you care about those accounts? If yes, probably best to do a password reset and set a new password. If you don't care about the account, then why bother?
As for why HIBP doesn't provide an API linking passwords to emails: HIBP has no database that links passwords and emails. So they can't provide any way to query that. They don't want to be in the business of linking passwords to emails.
It doesn't matter, don't use passwords that have been compromised. Period.
I was trying random phrases just out of curiosity, and couldn't help but chuckle when it said "epsteinfiles" wasn't found :-)
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
Spaces are skewing the numbers lower. Remove them from any of those and see the number increase at least an order of magnitude. That “let me login” goes from 0 to 4,714 just by removing spaces (“letmelogin”).
Password2020: 109,729
Edit:
louvre: 7,219
> all your base are belong to us: 1
Only 1, really?
Because of the spaces.
Without spaces, it's 681.
correcthorsebatterystaple (no spaces) 4,163
[flagged]
You can check against the API with just the first characters of your hashed password (SHA-1 or NTLM), for example: https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/21BD1 or you can download the entire dataset.
How can you download the entire dataset?
You can download the entire dataset using curl (will be 40+ GB)
It's not that I couldn't have written that oneliner, it's that I assumed you'd get blocked very quickly.
It is officially recommended by the Troy Hunt: https://github.com/HaveIBeenPwned/PwnedPasswordsDownloader/i...
That speaks to a certain confidence in one's servers ability to hold up under load, doesn't it?
"Oh you want your own copy? Sure, just thrash seven shades of shit out of the database. Here's how."
It's not a database, it's just files. And they are hosted by Cloudflare so they can cope with a lot of downloads.
I think he should make the files smaller my removing the second half of the hashes, i.e. reduce it from 40 hex digits to 20. This increases the change of a false positive (i.e. I enter my password, it says it was compromised but it wasn't, it just has the same hash as one that did) from 1 in 10^48 to 1 in 10^24 (per password), but that's still a huge number. (There's less than 10^10 people in the world, they only have a few passwords each). This will approximately halve the download, maybe more because the first half of each hash is more compressible (when sorted) the second half is totally random.
> It's not a database, it's just files. And they are hosted by Cloudflare so they can cope with a lot of downloads.
Database: a usually large collection of data organized especially for rapid search and retrieval (as by a computer) [1]
It is a database. Stop nitpicking.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/database
Confidence in Cloudflare, for sure.
That's crazy, thank you.
You are being purposefully obtuse here. HIBP is a very, very well established site with a long history of operating in good faith.
> > It's not that I couldn't have written that oneliner, it's that I assumed you'd get blocked very quickly.
> junon https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=junon
> You are being purposefully obtuse here. HIBP is a very, very well established site with a long history of operating in good faith.
Allowing people to query and someone downloading the entire dataset is normally considered abuse, so being blocked is the expectation here. You're so dense you're bending light around you.
Several open source tools can be found on GitHub, but here’s the “official” one https://github.com/HaveIBeenPwned/PwnedPasswordsDownloader
Second line I already notice:
> 000F6468C6E4D09C0C239A4C2769501B3DD:5894
... Does the 5894 mean what I think it does?
I remember when I was searching the file for some passwords my friends and family use, it took me a while to work out that number too. There are some passwords that many people seem to independently come up with and think must be reasonably secure. I suppose they are to the most basic of attacks.
5894 means that the password appeared 5894 times in the dataset.
5894 is not the password associated with the hash.
Yes, it did mean what I thought, then.
But I guess some passwords appear far more often than that in the dataset.
Some passwords are far more commonly used than others; that isn't surprising.
HaveIBeenPwned has been around for ages and it does not send your password to the server - you can check it with the browser console. It hashes it, sends a range of the hash to the server, server replies with a list of hashes that match that range and it's checked locally for a match.
Still, I would not trust that. The password could be leaked through other means, for example by setting a timer, and exfiltrating fragments of it across future requests.
The website loads some external fonts and spits out many warnings in the console by default. Does not instill confidence in the truly paranoid hacker.
You can hash yourself and check against the api with 5 lines of python
That level of care is warranted, but you'll find that you are given the tools to audit and it will pass.
You can check it yourself by looking up the hash prefix and searching for your hashed password.
Man, there's a ton of non-obvious ways they could exfiltrate that. I'm not going to read their code.
I was going to provide my passwords to any random person on the internet, Troy Hunt might be close to the top of the list, but I think your sentiment is sensible.
I remember searching the dataset being fairly straight forward. It's been a while since I've done it, but I think I just downloaded the text file and then grepped it for hashes of my passwords, but I see people doing much more useful things:
https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/creating-a-local-version...
You can download all the hashes and check against them locally. https://github.com/HaveIBeenPwned/PwnedPasswordsDownloader
> Passwords are protected with an anonymity model, so we never see them (it's processed in the browser itself), but if you're wary, just check old ones you may suspect.
That could mean one might be able to disconnect from the internet while checking.
No, it doesn't mean that, that's ridiculous. How would that work? Magic?
Download all the hashes first - not practical.
It's more practical than you may think. Just needs about 40 GBs right now. I did it a couple years back in a fit of peculiar paranoia, downloaded the full hash list and checked all my KeePass-stored passwords at that time against it.
https://github.com/HaveIBeenPwned/PwnedPasswordsDownloader
The above post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840724 links to 71.3 KiB of data; since it's a 5-nybble prefix (20 bits) we may easily estimate a size of 71.3 GiB assuming that's a representative sample. Not unfeasible nowadays, but it seems you do have to make separate requests and would presumably be rate-limited on them.
If you only download the hash pages corresponding to passwords you hold, even supposing that everything else is fully compromised, an attacker would have to reverse a couple thousand SHA-1 hashes, dodge hash collisions, and brute-force with the results (yes, yes: arson, murder and jaywalking) to pwn you.
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
Hash of the affected password? People share these things and don't always run their own mail servers.
That would be a great idea!
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.
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.
The API is free.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3
You don't need a paid subscription. The API is free.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3
The API is not free.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3#Authorisation
Only if you want to search by account. If you want to search by password, it's free. You can query all your passwords to see which ones are breached, and change those.
> Authorisation is required for all APIs that enable searching HIBP by email address or domain, namely retrieving all breaches for an account, retrieving all pastes for an account, retrieving all breached email addresses for a domain and retrieving all stealer log domains for a breached email addresses. There is no authorisation required for the free Pwned Passwords API.
And searching by account wouldn't tell you anything useful. It would just say "Synthient Credential Stuffing Threat Data". It wouldn't tell you what password to change, because HIBP doesn't know what site the password(s) that it found in "Synthient Credential Stuffing Threat Data" were associated with, and HIBP doesn't maintain a database linking passwords to emails.
The only part of the API that is free is the passwords API, which would not help for this use case.
Every other endpoint requires a subscription. This is very far from “The API is free”.
> searching by account wouldn't tell you anything useful
The API can return the domains listed in stealer logs for a specific email address: https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3#StealerLogsForEmail
Sorry, I missed that you were talking about stealer logs. This specific credential dump of 2B emails wasn't a stealer log, so stealer log info will not tell you anything about this specific credential dump.
You're right that the API for stealer log info isn't free.
However, the dashboard can provide you information about stealer logs for free.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/Dashboard#StealerLogs
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
Accounts can most often be closed or deleted permanently when one wants to stop or move. Some can change your address.
Speaking for myself, the "blast radius" of my email address is some 600+ accounts... (just looking in my password manager). The chances of me sitting down and closing every single one are non-existent. Many won't even have the luxury of having diligently tracked their login accounts in a password manager either.
Just having a family, kids, bills, schools, jobs, credit cards, banks, investments, insurance, shopping etc etc - the number of accounts many of us pick up can easily get into the hundreds.
What a lot of work to capture one account.
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
A real FB account with real friends who trust it (and are rich) is worth a lot
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
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
DM me your passwords Ill do it for you
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
We need to make storing customer data and recommendation algorithms a liability.
> 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...
> 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.
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.
Try Blake3 instead SHA-1
https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3
The sorting is the slowest step by far.
Hashing is so fast that you can hand-wave it away as zero cost relative to the time taken to read such a large amount of data. Also, you only have to do it once for the whole input, which means that it's O(n) time where 'n' is the gigabytes of passwords you have.
Sorting is going to need about O(n * log n) time even if it's entirely in memory, but more if it has to spool to disk storage then it'll take much longer than the hashing step.
PS: I just realised that 2 billion passwords is not actually that much data -- only 40 GB of hashes -- that's well within the range of what's "easy" to sort in-memory by simply creating an array of hashes that size and calling a standard library sort function.
What other algorithms have you used? I'm really interested in big data streams. I would like to hear not only successful solutions, but also failed ones. Have you tried using Bloom filters? Is it possible to merge shards using the Min-Heap algorithm?
Algorithm choice depends on what you're optimising for. The discussion a few years ago was dozens of small web servers handling a large volume of password change traffic (10K/sec!) needing a cheap centralised service for verifying against "known bad" passwords. On a cloud hosting platform, the optimal solution is a blob store of sorted binary hashes with a small (~1 MB) precomputed index stored in-memory in the web server that lets you query the main store with 1 or at most 2 reads. This is an optimal "one round trip" request, and the per-server overhead at the front end is negligible.
However, that approach assumes a slowly changing list where you don't mind that there's a delay of maybe a few hours to merge in a new list. Large lists of password leaks are infrequent, so this works fine for this usecase.
A two-layer approach with a small frequently updated hash set on top of the large infrequently built sorted list is more generally applicable to a wider range of problems.
Bloom filters are probabilistic, and aren't much faster to create than a sorted list. They also require 'k' random reads to test, where k is a small constant such as 3 to 5. If the filter is large (gigabytes), then you can't efficiently load it into many front-end web servers. If you query it over the network as a blob, you need 3-5x the I/O operations. You can wrap it in an API service that holds it in-memory, but that's still much more complex than simply storing and querying a blob in S3 or Azure Storage directly.
"Clever" algorithms like min-heaps or whatever are likely not worth the trouble. My decade-old PC can sort 2 billion hashes in about 30 seconds using the Rust "Rayon" crate. There are cloud VMs available for about $2/hr that have about a terabyte of RAM that could sort any reasonable sized list (10s of billions) in a few minutes at most.
The original article mention a week of 80 vCores of SQL Hyperscale, which is about $6,000 at PayG rates!
Sure, developer time is expensive, blah blah blah, but waiting a week ain't cheap either, and these days an AI can bang out the code for a password file hashing and sorting utility in a minute or two.
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.
All fair points and obviously well thought out by knowledgeable people. I approach problem solving the same way, accounting for staff familiarity with tools, not just the wall-clock time taken for some esoteric approach.
My observation is that in the last year or so the relative weight of these contributions has shifted massively because of AI code authoring.
It’s so fast and easy to whip up a few hundred lines of code with something like Gemini Pro 2.5 that I got it to make me a sorting benchmark tool just so I’d have a data point for a comment in this thread! I never would have had the time years ago.
For relatively “small” and isolated problems like password hash lookup tables, it’s amazing what you can do in mere hours with AI assistance.
If I was approaching this same problem just two years ago I would have picked SQL Hyperscale too, for the same(ish) reasons.
Now? I feel like many more avenues have been opened up…
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Are you sure you typed the right email address?
My 2012 Dropbox leak still shows up for my account.
Yes, I’m sure. The old password from that breach also doesn’t show any hits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
addy.io
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.
The number of passwords is probably smaller. ;)
~1.3e9 passwords, ~1.9e9 (account, password) tuples, if I understood
The joke, presumably, was that many people share the same shitty password (e.g. 123456, password1, etc).
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One reason is spam. The other is that in many cases passwords are leaked too.
Yeah, I agree. I consider them like public keys or IPs.
Troy Hunt’s brand is to exaggerate secret risk.
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.
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.
Any interesting finds on companies that tried to sell your data?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suggest KeepassXC + SyncThing + KeepassDX (for Android)
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).
Just check each unique password and then you know which sites need a password change?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Use a catch-all inbox. Fastmail supports them well in its web interface. I use unique addresses for every organisation.
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?
When you reply, any sensible system will use the address you received it at. Fastmail does this, as do many others (I used Thunderbird for many years, possibly with an extension to do that). To send an email from scratch you just type the address you want in the from field or select from a list. At no point is there any need to create specific addresses, as the catch-all means all addresses are already valid.
https://simplelogin.io/
duckduckgo's free email aliases. Can use it as a front-end and keep your existing domain
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?
proton unlimited, i think. mail plus doesn't seem to do it, which kinda sucks.
check simple login. they were both by Proton, but you can use them without the parent.
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!
How much did you donate to keep HIBP running?
What is the URL to your free HIBP alternative?
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?
Yes, unfortunately there is a whole industry out there after your data.
Amidst all of these pwnings, we still don't have a standard way to update our passwords from our password managers automatically.
if we could have standardization like that, we wouldn't need passwords
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...
Except passkeys are an opaque, awful solution.
They're hard to explain to users, the implementations want to lock people to specific devices and phones, you can't tell someone a passkey nor type it in easily over a serial link or between two devices which don't have electronic connectivity.
With the right apps, passkeys can be synced across devices (e.g. iCloud Keychain or 1Password).
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If there was a standard, do you know how long it would take to get adopted across the interwebs.
10 years.
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.
I feel like we missed the chance to have a standard http resource for this stuff.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That's passkeys. Google and Microsoft are pushing in that direction.
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.
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?
Giving out fake information is the only solution. Real name is only for the government and your employer.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Depending on the service, the billing data may be in its own database outside of the user tables.
I mean, for some services, likes banks / credit cards, it's required..
For others, I try to stay anonymous / aliased where possible.
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.
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.
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.
Got 10 hits. 8 of the email adressess were invalid like user1@ and user2@ while user@ would be the valid one
The email I have in that list is invalid and must be generated. It's on a domain I own.
Amusingly, hunter2 is listed with over 50.000 breaches.
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.
I'm guessing this is total, not an alert that something happened last night that exposed 2 billion email addresses.
Ah, so that's why I've been receiving emails about suspicious attempted logins...
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..
None of that is true, but you keep your outrage going.
If that makes you sleep better at night, you are free to believe none of that is true and just move on..
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.
Do some research on passwords, in particular read Bruce Schneier's stance on passwords.
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 :-
_Great_.What about "pass-codes"? Weren't they supposed replace passwords?
It's honestly very hard to even care at that scale.
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.
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
Almost like it's irresponsible to not require 2 factor now days.
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?
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Another ad for have i been owned? ... How much does it cost to advertise on hackernews?
-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
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.
More importantly, since HIBP sells monitoring services to 1Password, if they were maliciously collecting this data they would be immediately sued to oblivion.