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Troy Hunt

Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, run "Have I Been Pwned" and am a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals

Inside the Massive Alleged AT&T Data Breach

I hate having to use that word - "alleged" - because it's so inconclusive and I know it will leave people with many unanswered questions. But sometimes, "alleged" is just where we need to begin and over the course of time, proper attribution is made and the dots are joined. We're here at "alleged" for two very simple reasons: one is that AT&T is saying "the data didn't come from us", and the other is that I have no way of proving otherwise. But I have proven, with sufficient confidence, that the...

Weekly Update 391

I'm in Japan! Without tripod, without mic and having almost completely forgotten to do this vid, simply because I'm enjoying being on holidays too much 😊 It was literally just last night at dinner the penny dropped - "don't I normally do something around now...?" The weeks leading up to this trip were especially chaotic and to be honest, I simply forgot all about work once we landed here. And when you see the pics in the thread below, you'll understand why: Tokyo time! 🍣 pic.twitter.com/dG0...

Welcoming the Liechtenstein Government to Have I Been Pwned

Over the last 6 years, we've been very happy to welcome dozens of national governments to have unhindered access to their domains in Have I Been Pwned, free from cost and manual verification barriers. Today, we're happy to welcome Liechtenstein's National Cyber Security Unit who now have full access to their government domains. We provide this support to governments to help those tasked with protecting their national interests understand more about the threats posed by data breaches, and we loo...

Weekly Update 390

Let me begin by quoting Stefan during the livestream: " Turns out having tons of data integrity is expensive". Yeah, and working with tons of data in a fashion that's both fast and cost effective is bloody painful. I'm reminded of the old "fast, good and cheap - pick 2" saying, but there's a lot more nuance to it than that, of course. I mean Table Storage was all 3 of those, just so long as we never needed to restore at all, let alone to a point in time. Or geo-replicate. Or do ad hoc queries an...

Welcoming the German Government to Have I Been Pwned

Back in 2018, we started making Have I Been Pwned domain searches freely available to national government cybersecurity agencies responsible for protecting their nations' online infrastructure. Today, we're very happy to welcome Germany as the 35th country to use this service, courtesy of their CERTBund department. This access now provides them with complete access to the exposure of their government domains in data breaches. With the unabated flood of data breaches, we're happy to provide this...

Weekly Update 389

How on earth are we still here? You know, that place where breached companies stand up and go all Iraqi information minister on the incident as if somehow, flatly denying the blatantly obvious will make it all go away. It's the ease of debunking the "no breach here" claim that I find particularly fascinating; the truth is always sitting there in the data and it doesn't take much to bring it to the surface. Ah well, as I always end up lamenting, with behaviour like this it's a good time to be in...

Weekly Update 388

It's just been a joy to watch the material produced by the NCA and friends following the LockBit takedown this week. So much good stuff from the agencies themselves, not just content but high quality trolling too. Then there's the whole ecosystem of memes that have since emerged and provided endless hours of entertainment 😊 I'm sure we'll see a lot more come out of this yet and inevitably there's seized material that will still be providing value to further investigations years from now. Good j...

Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished

I've been getting a lot of those "your parcel couldn't be delivered" phishing attacks lately and if you're a human with a phone, you probably have been too. Just as a brief reminder, they look like this: These get through all the technical controls that exist at my telco and they land smack bang in my SMS inbox. However, I don't fall for the scams because I look for the warning signs: a sense of urgency, fear of missing out, and strange URLs that look nothing like any parcel delivery service I...

Weekly Update 387

It's a short video this week after a few days in Sydney doing both NDC and the Azure user group. For the most part, I spoke about the same things as I did at NDC Security in Oslo last month... except that since then we've had the Spoutibe incident. It was fascinating to talk about this in front of a live audience and see everyone's reactions first hand, let's just say there were a lot of "oh wow!" responses 😲 References 1. Sponsored by: Unpatched devices keeping you up at night? Kolide...

Weekly Update 386

Somehow, an hour and a half went by in the blink of an eye this week. The Spoutible incident just has so many interesting aspects to it: loads of data that should never be returned publicly, awesome response time to the disclosure, lacklustre transparency in their disclosure, some really fundamental misunderstands about hashing algorithms and a controversy-laden past if you read back over events of the last year. Phew! No wonder so much time went on this! (and if you want to just jump directly t...