14 DAY TRIAL // PwnedList, the service that alerts individuals and companies in case their account credentials are leaked online, has passed another milestone.
Steve Thomas, co-founder of PwnedList, has told Softpedia that the service has just completed its second year of data leak harvesting. Over 61 million leaked credentials from more than 3,400 data breaches have been collected.
Of these, 40 million usernames and passwords from over 2,800 data breaches have been collected in 2013 alone.
The company has managed to find over 28 million credentials, including plaintext passwords, stolen by hackers from the Chinese social media website Tianya back in 2011.
According to Thomas, the Tianya data was given to the company by a Chinese hacker who contacted them directly. He directed them to a leak share that included the Tianya data, along with other information they’re still analyzing.
It took PwnedList around 6 hours to import, analyze, and index the whole leak.
The service doesn’t have many individual Chinese customers. However, the Tianya data helps a few million Chinese accounts through the businesses PwnedList is protecting.
“We are very happy to have hit over 61 million credentials and 3,400 data leaks on the second anniversary of starting the PwnedList service. PwnedList daily helps protect hundreds of millions of account from hijacking and fraud,” Thomas told Softpedia via email.
“We have more than doubled our ability to collect hacker-stolen credentials year over year. 2013 is already a huge year for data leaks and we are excited to be able to help people know when they have been pwned.”
As far as future plans are concerned, PwnedList is preparing some interesting new features.
“Very soon we will allow people to look up their credentials by username and twitter handle, instead of just e-mail. We have also been putting together a huge new database to help identify people that have been the target of phishing attacks,” Thomas explained.