The site has been widely touted as a valuable resource for Internet users wishing to protect their own security and privacy.

averages around one hundred and sixty thousand daily visitors, the site has nearly three million active email subscribers and contains records of almost eight billion accounts.

Data breaches often show up on pastebins before they are widely reported on; thus, monitoring this source allows consumers to be notified sooner if they've been compromised.

[6] Along with detailing which data breach events the email account has been affected by, the website also points those who appear in their database search to install 1Password, a password manager which Troy Hunt has recently endorsed.

In August 2017, Hunt made public 306 million passwords which could be accessed via a web search or downloadable in bulk.

He realized breaches could greatly impact users who might not even be aware their data was compromised, and as a result, began developing HIBP.

Hunt wrote: Now that I have a platform on which to build I'll be able to rapidly integrate future breaches and make them quickly searchable by people who may have been impacted.

[5] As of the release of the blog post, he was working with KPMG to find companies he deemed suitable which were interested in the acquisition.

uses the hacker jargon term "pwn",[21] which means "to gain unauthorized access to or compromise" a computer system.

The data breach received wide media coverage, presumably due to the large number of impacted users and the perceived shame of having an affair.

Working with Thomas Fox-Brewster of Forbes, he verified that the dump was most likely genuine by testing email addresses from it and by confirming sensitive information with several 000webhost customers.

[31] Later that month, electronic toy maker VTech was hacked, and an anonymous source privately provided a database containing nearly five million parents' records to HIBP.

[33] In June 2016, an additional "mega breach" of 171 million accounts from Russian social network VK was added to HIBP's database.