Finovate Blog

Not long ago, a poster at the Credit Karma Credit Advice forum wrote:

I’ve been seeing links to see if my personal data is on the “dark web.” Is this something Credit Karma can do?

Now we know the answer to that question is “yes.”

Credit Karma has expanded its identity theft monitoring offering to include data from the dark web. Courtesy of a partnership with fellow Finovate alum – and Best of Show winner – SpyCloud, Credit Karma will dramatically increase the number of data breaches it is able to review for its 80 million users. Currently searching 4.5 billion public breaches, the new service will boost the total number of data breaches searched to 13 billion.

Vice President of Data Products Anish Acharya explained to TechCrunch that the decision to offer the dark web data breach search service was important for its users, and that a “pervasive” problem like identity theft from data breaches required a “comprehensive” solution. Credit Karma users can access the dark web monitoring service via the app in the ID Monitoring option in the Settings menu. The service can be accessed online via the Resources tab at the company’s website.

Credit Karma’s move comes less than a year after the company introduced its free identity monitoring service. This service provides users with monitoring, notifications, and advice such as how to report fraud, freeze their credit, or change their passwords. It adds to the free credit monitoring and personalized financial recommendations that has been the Credit Karma’s stock in trade since the company provided its first free credit score in 2008.

“Over the last ten years, you’ve come to rely on us as we continue to look for ways to help you save money and stay on top of your financial identity, and we take that trust seriously,” Credit Karma Product Manager Adam Boender wrote on the company’s blog when the new service was announced last fall. “As part of our mission to be your financial assistant, it made a lot of sense for us to build and provide ID monitoring as data breaches have become more prevalent.”

Last month, Credit Karma announced a $500 million secondary investment from Silver Lake that boosted its valuation to $4 billion. Named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in February, Credit Karma began the year partnering with American Express to offer tax refund advances. Credit Karma is one of Finovate’s earliest alums, demonstrating its technology at FinovateStartup 2009. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and was founded in 2007. Kenneth Lin is CEO.

Making its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2017 – and earning a Best of Show award – SpyCloud protects businesses and their customers from account takeover (ATO) attacks – a form of cyberfraud that is increasingly common due to the widespread reuse of passwords. The company’s solution protects Windows accounts from takeover automatically and leverages its rich dataset to launch new fraud investigations of potentially exposed customer and employee accounts, including those compromised credentials being actively traded on the dark web.

Founded in 2016, Austin, Texas-based SpyCloud has recovered more than 32 billion breached assets and more than 500,000 C-level executive records. The company’s technology recovers six million credentials a day and more than 50 breached databases per week. Read our feature on SpyCloud from last fall, SpyCloud Spots Stolen Credentials with Deep Dives into the Dark Web.