How this site is built
The engineering behind a live, server-rendered breach timeline.
Recent Data Leaks is a server-rendered site with no front-end framework and one runtime dependency. It currently tracks 1000 incidents and refreshes continuously.
Stack
- Vercel serverless and edge functions, no build step.
- Vanilla JavaScript for both the server renderer and the client. The pages are server-rendered for SEO, then hydrated for filtering, search, and navigation.
- Dependency-free aggregation. Sources are fetched server-side and parsed with hand-written RSS handling, so there is no CORS problem and no parser library.
How a request is served
- Pages (
/,/breach/:slug, archives) render full HTML in a serverless function with per-page title, meta, Open Graph, and JSON-LD. Vercel's CDN caches the result for ~15 minutes. - The feed (
/api/feed) aggregates Have I Been Pwned plus five security news feeds, dedupes and clusters them, and returns a light recent window for the client. - OG images (
/api/og) are generated as PNGs at the edge, per breach, so shared links show a real preview. - A bundled snapshot serves as a fallback so a page never renders blank if a source is down.
SEO surface
Every breach is its own indexable page with original "what to do" guidance and an FAQ. Year archives, per-company hubs, a statistics page, and a glossary add depth, all cross-linked and listed in a dynamic sitemap.
The source is on GitHub.