Troy Hunt

Using AI to analyse photos and send alerts if I've forgotten to take the bins out isn't going to revolutionise my life, no more so than using it to describe who's at the mailbox when a letter arrives and at the front door when they buzz. But that's really not the point; it's by playing with tech like this that firstly, you come to understand it better and secondly, you find genuinely impactful use cases. I keep scratching my head to try to work out where AI can do something really useful in HIBP...

It seems like every manufacturer of anything electrical that goes in the house wants to be part of the IoT story these days. Further, they all want their own app, which means you have to go to gazillions of bespoke software products to control your things. And they're all - with very few exceptions - terrible: That's to control the curtains in my office and the master bedroom, but the hubs (you need two, because the range is rubbish) have stopped communicating. That one is for the spa, but it...

I'm fascinated by the unwillingness of organisations to name the "third party" to which they've attributed a breach. The initial reporting on the Allianz Life incident from last month makes no mention whatsoever of Salesforce, nor does any other statement I can find from them. And that's very often the way with many other incidents too, which, IMHO, sucks. My view is that when our data is provided to a third party and that party exposes it, we have a very reasonable expectation to know who lost...

How much tech stuff do I have sitting there in progress, literally just within arm's reach? I kick off this week's video going through it, and it's kinda nuts. Doing runeos and house build doesn't help, but it means there's just a constant distraction of "things" commanding my attention. I couldn't even go through writing this very short blog post without feeling the need to see if I could pair that smoke alarm directly to ZHA on Home Assistant without needing the Clipsal hub; I couldn't, so now...

Spoiler: I have data from the story in the title of this post, it's mostly what I expected it to be, I've just added it to HIBP where I've called it "Data Troll", and I'm going to give everyone a lot more context below. Here goes: Headlines one-upping each other on the number of passwords exposed in a data breach have become somewhat of a sport in recent years. Each new story wants to present a number that surpasses the previous story, and the clickbait cycle continues. You can see it coming a...

We were recently travelling to faraway lands, doing meet and greets with gov partners, when one of them posed an interesting idea: What if people from our part of the world could see a link through to our local resource on data breaches provided by the gov? Initially, I was sceptical, primarily because no matter where you are in the world, isn't the guidance the same? Strong and unique passwords, turn on MFA, and so on and so forth. But our host explained the suggestion, which in retrospect ma...

I think the most amusing comment I had during this live stream was one to the effect of expecting me to have all my tech things neat and ordered. As I look around me now, there are Shellys with cables hanging off them all over my desk, the keyboard I'm typing on has become very flakey with the Bluetooth connection, a monitor colour tuning tool I've been meaning to run for years is still sitting there, there are seven boxes of Ubiquiti stuff on the floor waiting to be installed, an IoT smoke alar...

I'm often asked if cyber criminals are getting better at impersonating legitimate organisations in order to sneak their phishing attacks through. Yes, they absolutely are, but I also argue that the inverse is true too: legitimate organisations frequently communicate in ways that are indistinguishable from a phishing attack! I can name countless examples of banks, delivery services and even government agencies sending communication that I was convinced was a phish, but turned out to be legit. I o...

I've listened to a few industry podcasts discussing the Tea app breach since recording, and the thing that really struck me was the lack of discussion around the privacy implications of the service before the breach. Here was a tool where people were non-consensually uploading photos of others and leaving fairly intimate commentary about them. That MO seems to be, at least in part, related to the motive to take a service that presented massive privacy implications for the subject matters and, to...

This will be the title of the blog post: "Court Injunctions are the Thoughts and Prayers of Data Breach Response". It's got a nice ring to it, and it resonates so much with the response to other disasters where the term is offered as a platitude that has absolutely no practical benefit at all. You know, like the Qantas injunction to prevent data from their breach being examined by other parties. So, whilst it means journos won't be poring over it (and we won't be loading it into HIBP), criminals...