We’re excited to announce the release of an Application Programming Interface (API) for the BreachAlarm service, accessible via Secure HTTP. Our API enables third parties to check the breach status of their email addresses and/or domain names.
Since launching our business product, Business Watchdog last year, customers have been begging us for an API in order to query our database of over 231 million breached records from their own applications. Now, they can.
For those unfamiliar with BreachAlarm: we’ve created a data breach search engine that finds databases which have been published to hacker websites.
When our search engine comes across a database containing email addresses and passwords, it imports it and makes it available for people to search by domain name or email address, to see if they’ve been involved in a data breach.
Of course, we also securely “hash” all email addresses when we import a new breached database, and we don’t store the passwords at all.
With a database of over 231 million records, growing at around 70,000 records per day, there seems to be no end to the amount of freshly-leaked email and password combinations. In fact, 31% of people who check their email on BreachAlarm will find they’ve been involved in a breach.
How do we envisage our API being used?
The sky’s the limit (and that’s why we made it!)
While we can think of a number of specific use cases, we’re sure the developers and info-security folks out there can come up with many more.
For businesses and corporations: the main advantage to having access to our API is the immediacy with which you can be notified of new breaches containing employee data. This early warning system will help mitigating the risk of company data being accessed by hackers and cybercriminals.
With this in mind, businesses could regularly query their employee email addresses via our API and be warned when one appears in a breach.
Another use for web app developers may be to query our API when a new user signs up to their service. If the query shows the user has been involved in a security breach, the app could remind the user to use a unique password.
At BreachAlarm, our aim is to help make the web a safer place and we hope developers will use our API to that end.
Happy developing!
The BreachAlarm API is a paid service. For pricing, please contact support@breachalarm.com
