14 DAY TRIAL // InfoArmor, a company that provides identity protection and privacy management solutions, has acquired Aggra, Inc., the owner of PwnedList, the service that collects millions of leaked credentials so that it can inform users and businesses in case they’re impacted by a data breach.
“We are excited about the accelerated growth potential that the InfoArmor distribution platform brings to our credentials monitoring service,” said Steve Thomas, who co-founded Aggra in 2011 with Alen Puzic.
Thomas has told Softpedia that the merger will be beneficial for both parties. On one hand, it will provide PwnedList with a bigger and better infrastructure, more data feeds and more engineers to work on the service.
On the other hand, InfoArmor will be able to leverage the data harvested by PwnedList to enhance its PrivacyArmor identity protection service.
“One of the reasons for the merger is that we've found there is a huge relationship between compromised credentials and identity fraud, with some analysis showing that half of all fraud victims had compromised credentials shortly before the fraud,” Thomas told us.
As far as financial terms are concerned, the transaction is expected to be accretive to InfoArmor’s 2014 earnings per share.
“The acquisition was mostly equity in InfoArmor, with a cash component. InfoArmor is growing rapidly, with about 40x the revenue of PwnedList, so we are please to join the ranks of their shareholders,” Thomas added.
“InfoArmor could not be more pleased to welcome Stephen, Alen, and the PwnedList team. We believe their powerful, proprietary database will further differentiate and improve our flagship PrivacyArmor service while fueling growth in our employee benefits and wholesale business segments,” John Schreiber, InfoArmor president & CFO, commented on the acquisition.
Back in July, PwnedList harvested over 28 million credentials stolen by hackers in 2011 from Tianya, the Chinese social media website. Since then, the service has harvested tens of millions of additional credentials – most of which leaked from Chinese companies –, currently reaching a total of 110 million harvested records.