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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Have I Been Pwned No Longer For Sale:

After announcing last year that he was looking to sell Have I Been Pwned (HIPB), Troy Hunt said this week that the popular service has been pulled off the market and will instead continue to be run independently.

HIBP offers a free service for consumers to check if their usernames and passwords have been compromised in a data breach. Since it was founded seven years ago, the platform has skyrocketed to offer commercial services for companies (including its Pwned Passwords tool and more) and to include more large-scale breaches (including the massive 2019 Collection #1 data dump, totaling 773 million unique addresses and 87GB in size).

These increased capabilities are part of the reason why Hunt said in June 2019 he was listing the service for sale – In a posting at the time, he said the sheer amount of breached data that needed to be loaded into database has increased beyond the capability of one person.

However after a strenuous M&A process resulting in an "infeasible" deal with an exclusive bidder, Hunt said that he will instead continue to run the service independently. "After 11 months of a very intensive process, culminating in many months of exclusivity with a party I believed would ultimately be the purchaser of the service, unexpected changes to their business model made the deal infeasible," Hunt said in a Monday post. "It wasn't something I could have seen coming nor was it anything to do with HIBP itself, but it introduced a range of new and insurmountable barriers."

Original Submission