This post gives you an overview about how you can use data leaks and breaches in your investigations, how to maybe find them, how to search them and some handy tools build around them. Some of the presented techniques are variations of the contents from Michael Bazzells book “Open Source Intelligence Techniques” and I highly encourage you to buy this book. If you already have this book, read carefully through the chapter on “Data Breaches and Leaks” and you might find some more gold. Throughout this post I will provide you links to additional resources that explore some topics further.

In this post I will not include any screenshots or examples as they always include personal data I am not allowed to share. You could reproduce all steps with your own sample data to learn the techniques.