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The leaks are trivial to compile, and the tech is very basic, anyone with enough scripting skills and alcohol can do it in under a month. The real value of HIBP

The leaks are trivial to compile, and the tech is very basic, anyone with enough scripting skills and alcohol can do it in under a month. The real value of HIBP is the owner's credibility in the security industry when it comes to offering a service that 'sounds like' it requires some trust (it really doesn't because you can use the service with data anonymization features). The problem is he has been a complete failure on the business side. If he marketed it as 'you can fire 50% of your customer support if you stop account cracking using our service', charge per requests, and provided a bunch of code integrations there's no reason this couldn't be used by thousands of businesses, including top companies which have serious account cracking problems.

Spooky23 6y ago
The business model wasn't selling the service, but as with many security personalities, buying attention. People in a fairly wide circle know who Troy Hunt is. He can probably get a good honorarium, flight and free dinner for speaking to the Kentucky Association of Banking Compliance Officers or whatever. It's probably reaching a point where the return on announcing breaches is declining, and the potential value of selling data of questionable origin to a legit entity is very challenging. The dataset gets less valuable every day because anyone can start collecting breaches today, and the value of old breaches goes down -- who cares about an Adobe account leak from 2012?