"Have I Been Pwned?" Created

Have I Been Pwned? or also known as just HIBP, is a website that allows people to check whether their personal data has been compromised by data breaches.

It was created in the late 2013 by web security expert Troy Hunt. At that time, he was analyzing data breaches for trends and patterns. This was when he realized that breaches could greatly impact people who might not be aware that their data has been compromised.

For this reason, he created HIBP.

The site was established following Adobe’s mishandling of data relating to 153 million accounts in October 2013. "Probably the main catalyst was Adobe," said Hunt describing his motivation for starting the site.

Have I Been Pwned?
"Now that I have a platform on which to build I'll be able to rapidly integrate future breaches and make them quickly searchable by people who may have been impacted. It's a bit of an unfair game at the moment – attackers and others wishing to use data breaches for malicious purposes can very quickly obtain and analyse the data but your average consumer has no feasible way of pulling gigabytes of gzipped accounts from a torrent and discovering whether they've been compromised or not."

HIBP collects and analyzes dozens of database dumps and pastes containing information about leaked accounts.

Initially, it only had five data breaches: Adobe Systems, Stratfor, Gawker, Yahoo! Voices, and Sony Pictures. But as soon as Hunt added a feature which enabled new data breaches to be automatically added to HIBP's database, the number of data breaches it collected grew exponentially.

This feature uses a bot which detects broadcasts about possible password dumps found on pastebin. Data breaches often show up on pastebins before they are widely reported on due to their simplicity and anonymous nature.

Since its launch, the primary focus of HIBP has been to add new data breaches as soon as they are leaked to the public.