This article was published on August 12, 2013

Identity monitoring firm InfoArmor buys breach monitoring service PwnedList


Identity monitoring firm InfoArmor buys breach monitoring service PwnedList

Identity monitoring firm InfoArmor today announced the acquisition of breach monitoring service Aggra, a firm that operates under the trade name PwnedList. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Aggra is now a wholly owned and consolidated subsidiary of InfoArmor.

Co-founded in 2011 by Stephen Thomas and Alen Puzic, Aggra harvests information from corporate data leaks. Over the last two years, the company has assisted “many” large corporations in mitigating the risk of compromised email addresses and passwords.

Both Thomas and Puzic will be joining InfoArmor, which provides B2B identity monitoring services to nearly a half million subscribers. “We are excited about the accelerated growth potential that the InfoArmor distribution platform brings to our credentials monitoring service,” Thomas said in a statement.

pwnedlist

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For those who don’t know, PwnedList is a service that helps users figure out if their account credentials have been stolen as part of a hack. The company crawls public sites where hackers post stolen data and then indexes all the login credentials it finds.

“InfoArmor could not be more pleased to welcome Stephen, Alen, and the PwnedList team,” InfoArmor President and CFO John Schreiber said in a statement. “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.”

At the time of publication, here were the PwnedList’s statistics:

  • 115,334,742 account credentials harvested.
  • 3,698 leaks discovered.
  • 1,032,070,619 passwords collected.
  • 323,334,742 email addresses found.

The organization and indexing of such a large amount of data alone is likely what caught InfoArmor’s eye. We’re holding our fingers crossed that the parent doesn’t screw it up.

See also – LivingSocial hack affecting some 50M accounts reported, passwords reset but no credit card info breached and Twitter says that it was hacked and 250,000 users may have been compromised

Top Image Credit: Gustavo Molina

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