Year on year, Proton has been expanding its privacy-focused offerings like there's no tomorrow, from encrypted email and VPN to cloud storage and password management.
Their latest move tackles a different problem. Data breaches happen constantly, but many companies avoid reporting them publicly. Proton wants to change that.
Today, Proton announced the Data Breach Observatory, a platform that monitors data breaches by sourcing information directly from dark web criminal marketplaces.
Dark Web Monitoring Made Easy
The Data Breach Observatory is a public platform that tracks cyber attacks and data breaches. It sources data from dark web forums where criminals buy and sell stolen information.
The platform updates in near real-time and publishes newly discovered breaches. Anyone can access it to check breach data.
Users can see which organizations were breached, what kind of data was exposed, the size of the company, and how many records were compromised. The platform aims to provide transparency in an industry that often lacks it.
Proton partnered with Constella Intelligence to monitor dark web activity. Together, they identify breaches as they appear on criminal forums and marketplaces.
In 2025 alone, Proton has found 794 incidents exposing over 300 million individual records. This only counts breaches tied to identifiable companies and doesn't consider any aggregated datasets.
Including those compilations, the actual scale reaches 1,571 incidents with hundreds of billions of records. Email addresses appeared in 100% of breaches. Names featured in 90%, contact information in 72%, and passwords in 49%.
The Data Breach Observatory serves both businesses and individual users. Companies can learn if their data appeared on the dark web, potentially before discovering the breach themselves.
Why Launch This?
Proton wants to address the lack of transparency around data breaches. Cybercrime is growing, but facts remain hidden when companies choose not to disclose incidents.
The platform will alert affected businesses before publishing breach information, allowing organizations time to secure systems and notify any affected people.
The Director of Engineering, AI & ML at Proton, Eamonn Maguire, further states that:
Our mission with the Data Breach Observatory is simple, to reveal unseen breaches and to alert affected businesses and organisations as they happen. This is part of Proton's drive to empower organisations and individuals with the tools to protect themselves.
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Abhishek Prakash
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