The Ethics of Running a Data Breach Search Service
&quot;Hey, Microsoft&#x27;s Azure Active Directory alerted me to leaked credentials but won&#x27;t give me any details so there&#x27;s very little I can do about it&quot;<p>* * *<p>&quot;An increasingly large number of organisations are doing precisely what&#x27;s described above - trawling the underbelly of the web, obtaining breached data then using it to better protect their own accounts. <i>You think about it</i> - if, for example, Amazon finds a dump of data that has thousands of their customers in there with the same username and password as on their own service, that&#x27;s really useful info for them.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.troyhunt.com&#x2F;random-thoughts-on-the-use-of-breach-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.troyhunt.com&#x2F;random-thoughts-on-the-use-of-breac...</a><p>Yes, I do think about it.<p>But my thoughts are not reflected by these blog posts.<p>First, if a confidential email address leaked, potentially to any third party who is interested, the last thing I would want as the owner is to give that email address, or provide any meta data about it, to one more third party.<p>Thus, any website &quot;service&quot; purporting to check the dump for a particular email address is, for me, unacceptable.<p>I recall the months before Hunt started his website, when others were running similar websites to search then-current dumps of data breaches.<p>In online discussions at the time it seemed that many observers were correctly identifying these sites as a potential means for third parties to collect email addresses or even for parties in possession of a dump to verify which email addresses were active, and to correlate them with an IP address.<p>This sort of critical commentary seems to have died off, and today a high-traffic site like Hunt&#x27;s appears to be bordering on some sort of commercial enterprise.  It is frightening to think of all the dumps he has collected and that they reside on computers connected to the internet.  He further discloses that he is affiliated with Microsoft&#x2F;LinkedIn.<p>There exists at least one user who would be willing to download dumps and check for themselves, privately, <i>offline</i>.FN1  Downloads of the dumps are not provided.  However Hunt mentions users were querying his site at 40,000 queries per minute.  One can see why Hunt might be having some ethical questions about what he is doing.<p>Those parties who really want these dumps will get them.  (I can accept this.)  But the fact that it may be Microsoft or another web company that is getting them is IMO no less potentially harmful.  Unfortunately the availablity of dumps has not led to sites that provide a means for users to search privately offline but instead ones that purport to check the dumps in return for further data e.g.  &quot;Enter an email address.&quot;  (I still have a difficult time accepting this, hence this comment.)<p>While companies obtaining the dumps can make an argument they are not the &quot;bad guys&quot; I find it no less concerning that they are obtaining the data.<p>Some of the data may relate to their own customers as Hunt suggests, <i>however some of it may not</i>.<p>Second, we have no idea how companies are using the data.  I think it is naive or deliberately ignorant to believe they will not use it in ways that put their own commercial interests before those of the persons owning the data in the dumps.<p>Third, for some users, the data was never meant to be in the possession of these companies.  In fact, that may have been the reason the data was &quot;private&quot; to begin with, i.e. to protect against the privacy invasiveness of such companies.  To these users, the <i>companies</i> may be the &quot;bad guys&quot;.<p>Anyway, those are my thoughts.  As you can see, they differ somewhat from Mr. Hunt&#x27;s.<p>FN1.  Bias discosure: I write filters that transform &quot;unreadable&quot; formats, like SQL dumps, to readable text, as a hobby.  Of course it has crossed my mind that someone could provide software that lets a user 1. download a dump (in the same way they routinely download other large files e.g. videos), 2. converts the file to a simple text format and 3. provides a simple search interface to search the saved dump <i>offline</i>.  I am not suggesting this is the best solution for everyone.  Nor am I suggesting that no one should use Hunt&#x27;s website.  I am merely commenting that I do not see online search via a third party website nor joining an email alert list as ideal solutions.  I am suggesting there should be more critical commentary of these sites and &quot;services&quot; and consideration that maybe we as users could do better.