Data breaches are a thing. They’re not news to anyone – every week or two we hear about a new data breach that has happened. For some people, data breaches are directly related to data breach checkers: a data breach checker essentially is a data breach search engine allowing people to see if they’re at risk of identity theft or a data breach archive simply archiving data breaches that have happened in the past and providing people a list of them to see, but not to search through.
A data breach checker, as already previously mentioned, is essentially a data breach search engine letting people search through data breaches. Once people make use of the search engine, they know whether they’re at risk of identity theft or not. With that being said, not all data breach checkers are made equal, and not all of them are made in a legal fashion as well. Here are some of the factors to consider when looking at a particular data breach search engine or a data breach checker:
Data breach checkers can be made to cause harm (and allow people to earn money through nefarious ways..), but they can also be made to adhere to good causes – the main one being to protect people from identity theft attacks.
In 2016, news hit the information security community that one of the most prominent data breach search engines (at the time) had been taken down by the police. The search engine was notorious for quickly gaining access to data breaches, and also providing anyone access to all of the data in data breaches for a small fee.
To security experts and search engines operating on the legal side, it wasn’t huge news – sure, some may have been devastated by the search engine’s demise, however, it’s easy to see why the police have decided to take decisive action:
While we can’t say for certain that such data breach search engines won’t appear in the security space in the future, one thing is for sure – the operators of data breach search engines have to be extremely careful to not step into the wrong side and operate ethically.
BreachDirectory, as you might already know, is both a data breach search engine and, as its name suggests, also a data breach directory (archive.) Our search engine doesn’t provide any information other than the fact that an account is at risk of identity theft or not, so BreachDirectory operates on the ethical side. The API offering of BreachDirectory is also built with immense care – it’s documented, and those people who are suspected of using the API for malicious tasks are banned from accessing it. The upside is that the API is hard to use maliciously even if someone deeply desires to do so – all good on that front!
Make sure to run a search through our data breach search engine, check the data breach listing to review the list of archived data breaches, and make use of the search engine’s API capabilities to boost the security stance of your company today, and until next time!
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