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Comment by gtank | Hacker News Reader

Similar, and interesting in the context of LulzSec releases, is @PastebinLeaks on Twitter. It scans Pastebin for a variety of things (mail address lists, PGP keys, SQL dumps, and router configuration files have all popped up so far). They're not 100% - especially the mail/password dump detection - but it's definitely catching stuff.

http://twitter.com/#!/PastebinLeaks

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These kind of tools cause more harm than good.

That's balderdash. These kinds of tools raise awareness of the issue, hopefully making more people think twice about posting private data to a public place. If they continue to be unaware of the danger of doing so, then it is simply exploited silently and everyone wonders how it happened.

Your statement assumes that security through obscurity is a good thing.

At this point, you're both right - exposing these things to a massive audience just increases the number of potential attackers.

Someone ought to write a tool that follows this account, and e-mails people warning them that their e-mail has been compromised.

The hard part would be explaining what happened, how to verify it, and how to fix it to random strangers without convincing them that you're the one who just tried to steal their life savings.

www.hacknotifier.com does this (disclaimer: I started it) - but it requires the user to subscribe to our service. Unfortunately, cold emailing them (which we considered), would be considered spam.

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