Company compiles massive marketing database by scraping data dumps

SalesMaple, a recently founded data analytics startup headed by PwnedList founder Steve Thomas, has made available a free database of some 30 million business contacts, which has been compiled by sifting through data dumps.

“After moving from PwnedList to SalesMaple, I found that the security community’s ability to mine contact information out of the large sets of data available in the hacker community far outpaced the sales/marketing contacts databases available,” Thomas noted.

“Not only that, but the security community has access to hundreds of millions of records of free intelligence, where sales/marketing pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the same data. So we are tapping into the knowledge available in the hacker community and making that accessible to sales, marketing, and security professionals alike.”

The database contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other business information, and is expected to grow to include over 100 million contacts in the next few months. The data is continually assessed for validity and modified according to the results.

“We monitor the hacker community for data dumps and mine common pasting sites or file dump sites like pastebin, pastebay, or sendshare to get a large stream of data,” Thomas told The Register.

The database can be searched online, but security professionals will also be able to access it by using pre-penetration testing (reconnaissance) tools such as Recon-ng, which will access the information via a RESTful API.