PwnedList tech and talent acquired, big plans lay ahead

PwnedList acquired by InfoArmor

In February, we introduced you to PwnedList, the largest database of stolen credentials which allows you to search by your email address to see if you’ve been hacked. Just because your account isn’t sending out fake airline promotions or pharmaceutical ads to all of your contacts doesn’t mean you haven’t been hacked, so searching PwnedList or monitoring your company’s email addresses is the fastest way to get the real story, as the company grab data leaks when they happen – in other words, if you’ve been hacked, your email address is in their database.

Today, the Austin startup is announcing they have been acquired by identity protection company InfoArmor, and as they merge, PwnedList Co-Founder, Steve Thomas says they will be able to “leverage a bigger & better infrastructure, more data feeds, and more engineers to work on the PwnedList service; while InfoArmor is going to be able to leverage the PwnedList data to enhance their PrivacyArmor identity protection service.”

Thomas added, “One of the reasons for the merger is that we’ve found there is a huge relationship between compromised credentials and identity fraud, with some analysis showing that half of all fraud victims had compromised credentials shortly before the fraud.”

Will PwnedList remain in Austin?

PwnedList will still be called PwnedList and all team members will remain in tact, in fact, the acquisition allows them to add more engineers and expand their team.

For PwnedList, the acquisition was mostly equity in InfoArmor, with a cash component. Thomas tells AGBeat, “InfoArmor is growing rapidly, with about 40x the revenue of PwnedList, so we are please to join the ranks of their shareholders.”

Additionally, Thomas notes that InfoArmor has a much larger data center and information delivery infrastructure and a team of engineers three times the size of their existing team which will provide added muscle.

The company will remain in Austin as a core office for InfoArmor, which is headquartered in Scottsdale, and Thomas will stay on as President of PwnedList and Director of Business Development for InfoArmor and Co-Founder Alen Puzic will be InfoArmor’s new Director of Engineering.

“There is a huge potential for even better identity theft protection with our services combined,” said Thomas. “So we definitely want to explore that. Alen and I have had some ideas about phishing attacks and how we can help protect people from those and InfoAmor is going to help us see if we can make that happen.”