Find leaks in the wild

This is where data surfaces before anything indexes it, and where most of what

you find is a recombination of things that leaked years ago. Two mistakes cost

people most: assuming a paste host's own search will find pastes, and reporting

a combolist as a breach. The first wastes a day; the second is a factual error

in a deliverable and it will be found.

Where to start with what you're holding

You have	Start with	Why
An email or username	A curated breach service first	Cheap, attributed, and answers most questions — what-leaked-about-you
A selector you think is circulating now	site: sweep of paste hosts, then a paste aggregator	Engines are shallow but free; aggregators reach what was never crawled
A paste that has been deleted	A historical paste corpus	Deletion is the norm; some services retain the content
A claimed breach of a named company	The company's own disclosure, then a regulator notification	One authoritative source beats any amount of forum chatter
A dataset being advertised	Structural analysis of the sample	You almost never need the full dataset to answer the question
A domain you're defending	Vendor monitoring plus your own canary selectors	One-off searches miss everything posted between them

Source-by-source access model and risk:

[reference/source-catalogue.md](reference/source-catalogue.md).

Why paste-site search doesn't work

Pastes are unlisted by default. No index page, no directory, reachable only by

URL — so there is nothing for the host to search and nothing for a crawler to

follow. Where a host offers a firehose or scraping interface at all, it is

typically restricted to paid accounts with IP allowlisting, because the open

version got abused. Volume is enormous and retention is short.

So people find pastes four other ways, in rough order of yield: third-party

aggregators that continuously scrape paste hosts and index the content;

historical paste corpora that retain content after the original was deleted;

search-engine site: queries, which are shallow because the pages are unlinked

and short-lived but cost nothing; and curated breach services that index pastes

alongside breaches.

Run the free ones first; query shapes are in google-like-a-spy. Note that the

paste ecosystem is far wider than the obvious hosts: minimal modern paste

services, code sandboxes, gists, published-to-web documents, and

client-side-encrypted paste software whose content the server itself cannot

read, making it invisible to every aggregator that exists.

Forums: a category with a life cycle

Do not learn site names; learn the pattern. A forum accumulates users and data,

becomes the recognised marketplace, attracts law enforcement, gets seized or its

operator arrested — and within weeks a successor appears claiming continuity,

often with the same staff and the imported user database. The names change. The

category does not.

Three consequences that change how you behave:

• **A forum "restored" after a seizure may be operated or monitored by law

enforcement.** This has happened. Registering puts your details into an

evidence set.

• Registration is a durable risk. Forum databases leak, get seized, and get

published. Assume any account you create becomes public eventually, with its

email, IP history and posts attached.

• What an unregistered visitor can see is the marketing, not the data.

Reputation tiers and paywalls gate the actual datasets, which is exactly why

paying for access is where the legal exposure escalates.

Many organisations prohibit investigators from touching these sites at all and

buy the intelligence from a vendor who has accepted the risk contractually. That

is a legitimate answer, not a cop-out.

Telegram is the distribution layer

Structural reasons, not fashion: channels broadcast to unlimited subscribers,

large files attach directly, a banned channel is recreated in minutes, and

public channels are reachable without an invitation.

Read public channels in a browser through the platform's public preview. No

account, no joining. Joining is an account action that exposes you, and for

reading a public channel it buys you nothing. Do this first and, in most

investigations, only.

Discovery is the hard part — in-app search is weak for finding channels you do

not already know about. Third-party channel indexes and channel-search services

are the practical route, and they additionally give you subscriber history and

post archives that the channel itself will not.

Two platform specifics worth knowing. **Forwarded messages carry attribution to

the originating channel**, so a forward chain reconstructs the distribution path

and often reaches the source. And **bots are used as retrieval front-ends for

leak databases** — querying one exposes your account and hands your selectors to

its operator, so treat any such bot as an intelligence collector pointed at you.

Channels vanish and take their archive with them. Capture posts, file listings

and metadata the moment you see them.

If you need an account, it must be dedicated, on a number that is not yours,

with discovery and contact-sync settings locked down before first launch.

investigate-without-getting-made covers the whole environment; do not

improvise it here.

Genuine leak or recycled combolist

The default hypothesis for anything presented as a new breach is that it is a

recombination of older material, because most of it is. Make the claim earn its

way past that.

The strongest evidence is external: the alleged victim's own disclosure, or a

regulator or CERT notification. Check those before touching the data.

Structurally, a genuine source dump inherits its schema from the application it

came from: consistent column order, coherent internal identifiers with gaps

where records were deleted, registration timestamps spread across the service's

actual lifetime, a hash scheme plausible for that era, email-domain distribution

matching the user base, and — the strongest positive signal — fields only this

service would collect, like a subscription tier or a game character name.

A combolist looks like none of that: two columns, no metadata, sorted and

deduplicated, a suspiciously round record count, several hash formats mixed

together, and heavy overlap with older well-attributed breaches at the same

passwords. Some overlap is normal because people reuse credentials — what you

are measuring is the rate.

Two other failure modes to rule out: a public scrape marketed as a hack,

where every field is one the platform already displayed; and a **dataset that

already circulated under another name**, found by searching the announcement's

distinctive strings — exact record count, file name, seller's phrasing — across

paste and forum corpora.

Full checklist and grading:

[reference/authenticity-triage.md](reference/authenticity-triage.md).

Monitoring versus searching once

A one-off search answers "is it out there now" and misses everything posted

between searches, which given typical paste retention is most of it. Ongoing

exposure needs continuous collection, and practically that means buying vendor

monitoring, since running your own collection against these sources is exactly

the risk you were avoiding. Ask one question before buying: **when did their

collection start**, because coverage begins there and nobody backfills what they

never captured.

Then measure them. Seed canary selectors — unique email addresses and

identifiers, distinct per vendor and per partner — into the systems you are

protecting. A canary tells you not just that a leak happened but which

downstream party leaked it, making it the only mechanism here that produces

attribution rather than detection. It also independently measures whether your

monitoring vendor sees what they claim.

Where this goes wrong

• Combolists destroy provenance. A hit tells you a pair appeared somewhere,

not which service it came from — which was the entire investigative value.

• Claimed dates are marketing. Breach date, first-circulation date, and the

date your source ingested it are three different things, often years apart.

• Absence is uninformative. Not finding a selector means it is not in the

corpora you can reach. Most leak material is never posted publicly at all.

• Sellers lie about scope in both directions, inflating for price and

understating to avoid attention. Scrapes get relabelled as breaches

constantly, including by vendors.

• Your searches are logged — by vendor platforms, by bots, by forum search

boxes. Assume every selector you look up is retained by someone.

• Announcement volume is not incident volume. The same dataset gets

re-announced by many resellers, and counting posts overstates activity.

• Malware and phishing are the point on mirrors and clones of leak sites,

which specifically target people arriving via search for a new domain.

Confidence grading

• Confirmed — the alleged victim or a regulator has disclosed the incident,

and the sample's structure is consistent with that disclosure.

• Probable — no disclosure, but service-specific fields, coherent internal

identifiers, plausible timestamps and hashes, and low overlap with prior

corpora.

• Unconfirmed — a credible sample with no disclosure and no distinguishing

structure, or a dataset you have only seen described by a seller.

• Rejected — high overlap with prior breaches at the same passwords, a

two-column combolist shape, a record count exceeding the victim's plausible

user base, a scrape presented as a compromise, or an earlier appearance under

another name.

Keep three claims separate in writing: that a dataset exists and is circulating;

that it contains records relating to your subject; and that your subject's

systems were compromised. The third is much stronger, and a subject's data leaks

from suppliers, partners, old acquisitions and unrelated services too.

Worked example

A client's domain appears in a Telegram post advertising a "fresh 2.4M breach"

of a named SaaS provider they use.

The vendor has published no disclosure and no regulator notification exists. The

seller's sample, read from the channel's public web preview without joining, is

two columns of email:password, sorted, with no user IDs, no registration

dates, and no fields specific to that product.

The dead end: searching the exact record count and file name across paste corpora

turns up nothing earlier, so the "already circulated under another name" test is

inconclusive rather than confirming.

Overlap settles it. Twelve sample records checked against a curated breach

service appear in three older, well-attributed breaches with identical

passwords. Round count, no schema, near-total overlap: a combolist marketed

under a recognisable brand name.

Reported as: records relating to client staff are circulating — probable;

the named provider was compromised — rejected, with reasoning recorded. The

client's remediation is password rotation regardless, since the credentials are

in circulation whatever their origin.

Pivots

New selector	Goes to
Email addresses in a dump	what-an-email-reveals, what-leaked-about-you
Usernames and handles	hunt-a-handle
Phone numbers	whose-number-is-this
Domains and hostnames in a listing	who-owns-this-domain, find-hidden-subdomains
Wallet addresses in a sale post	follow-the-crypto
Seller or channel-operator persona	find-anyone, graph-the-network
Attached documents and images	secrets-in-file-metadata, is-this-photo-real
Credentials or keys traced to a repository	secrets-in-git-history
A post or channel that has since been deleted	read-deleted-pages

Legal and handling notes

Never use a leaked credential to authenticate to anything. Not to verify the

account exists, not once, not with a client's verbal blessing. Credential

stuffing is unauthorized access under computer-misuse law in most jurisdictions

and public availability of the password is not a defence. The same applies to

password resets and recovered security-question answers.

Never purchase, solicit, or trade for leaked data. Beyond funding the trade,

purchase and solicitation are criminal in many jurisdictions where reading a

public page is not, and this is the line that turns an investigation into an

offence.

Possession is jurisdiction-dependent. Some jurisdictions criminalise

possession of certain categories of stolen data irrespective of how it was

obtained, and others treat it as lawful processing subject to data-protection

rules. Know which regime applies to you before you download anything, and get

that decision in writing on any engagement where downloading is contemplated.

Practically: analyse samples rather than acquiring full datasets, retain the

minimum, store encrypted at rest with access logged, never retain credentials,

delete on a schedule written down at the start, and record why each retained

item was necessary. Under GDPR and equivalent regimes this is personal data and

often special-category data, and processing it needs a lawful basis. See

[../../ETHICS.md](../../ETHICS.md).