Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Have I Been Pwnd?

The term "to be pwnd" comes from the online gaming culture. (There's an oxymoron for you.)  

“'Pwn' is a lot like the sense of 'own,' which means ‘to have power or mastery over (someone),’” the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains. “It has also been used to describe the act of gaining illegal access to something.”

That secondary definition stems from the hacker and programming community that have used the word to describe obtaining unauthorized control of someone else’s computer. It’s a word steeped in internet history, but its origins predate the web and were largely based on misunderstandings and typos that were then adopted as an idiom.

So if your online credentials are available for sale or rent on the dark web you have been "pwnd."  See links. I don't make this stuff up.

The best explanation of the how, why, and by whom did Have I Been Pwnd comes from its creator itself.  HIBP is the brainchild of:

I'm Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional awardee for Developer Security, blogger at troyhunt.com, international speaker on web security and the author of many top-rating security courses for web developers on Pluralsight.

I created HIBP as a free resource for anyone to quickly assess if they may have been put at risk due to an online account of theirs having been compromised or "pwned" in a data breach. I wanted to keep it dead simple to use and entirely free so that it could be of maximum benefit to the community.

Short of the odd donation, all costs for building, running and keeping the service currently come directly out of my own pocket. Fortunately, today's modern cloud services like Microsoft Azure make it possible to do this without breaking the bank!

ED. Links are from the original website. I changed the destination of the hyperlinks so each would open in its own window.

So Have I Been Pwnd?

When you go to the website at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ you are greeted with a very large search box where you can type in an email address or password to see if those particular credentials have been included in one of an endless streams of data dumps.  Let's see if the email address used to give notice of new Dispatches has been pwnd.

PTL!!! NO Pwnage!!

Now let's see about that other email address of questionable heritage.

GREAT CEASAR'S GHOST I'VE BEEN PWND!!!!

Furthermore, not only will HIBP inform you if your email address has been found in a one or more trove of stolen data, HIBP will also list in which trove or troves your pwnd data was found.

All 3 of the data breaches listed above were well publicized data dumps.  Fortunately, and NOT DOCUMENTED here for obvious reasons, none of the critical passwords associated with this email address were found in subsequent searches.

So Kiddies, here's one you can safely try at home.  Go to HaveIBeenPwnd and take the test.  But be sure and ask Mom or Dad first.

And how do I feel about that email address being pwnd?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gerald Reiff