What is a data breach?

The 'official' definition would be the following: "A data breach is a security violation in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorised to do so."

In the context of SEON, we check if the Email address you include in your requests was involved in any of these, either intentional or unintentional Data/information leakages, from an external database (https://haveibeenpwned.com/).

The result of this check, i.e. the number of breaches and the time of the first one, can tell you a whole lot about an Email address, and, in turn, a Customer as well. Generally, the more breaches the Email was involved in and the earlier it was, the more likely that the address was in actual use and is not just a throwaway, disposable Gmail account that they created to defraud your company.