LeakedSource was a website that surfaced leaked data when they find their way to the dark parts of the web. Acting like the Yellow Pages for leaks, when a website got hacked and its data leaked, it aggregated the data and allowed people to access them all in one place.
As a for-profit website, its business model relied on providing people the access for the hacked database for a fee. Data obtained by LeakedSource could be useful for journalists and competitors to the hacked accounts. Or even to those that may have sinister plans in mind.
On January 26th, 2015, LeakedSource came offline. The notorious and controversial service that was selling more than 3 billion worth of hacked accounts suddenly vanished, now for good.
A user that goes under the handle LTD, wrote in an online forum OGFlip:
LeakedSource has been criticized about its business model as well as its controversy that allowed users to subscribe to the site in order to get access to raw data that include usernames, emails, phone numbers and also passwords.
LeakedSource once said that its mission was to educate people who might be affected, and to give pressure on companies to disclose the breaches. However, critics argued that LeakedSource could also provide hackers the easy means to access innocent people's accounts.
Some of the recent and largest data breaches include AdultFriendFinder and millions of Twitter and MySpace accounts.
LeakedSource was just one of the several services that provided access to data leak. One competitor like the "Have I Been Pwned" which allows people to check if their email address or username was ever been exposed to hack. However, Have I Been Pwned takes a different approach to LeakedSource as it "never makes any sensitive personally identifiable data available to anyone, not even the legitimate owners of the data."
As for LeakedSource, it decrypted passwords it had obtained through data dumps. Because passwords weren't anymore scrambled, LeakedSource was seen as a more valuable source.