Troy Hunt

Apparently the average number of apps someone has on their smartphone is 41 [http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/average-us-smartphone-user-has-41-apps-their-device] . It sounds like a lot but do the maths on how long you’ve had the phone (or a predecessor) and it you realise it’s a pretty low frequency of taking something new from the app store. A significant proportion of these apps allow you to share sensitive personal information with them; your home address, phone number, email and p...

Well that’s my first TechEd down as both a speaker and a delegate and what better place to have it than in my home town of the Gold Coast. For international readers, think of it as having all the best bits of what you know of Australia (beaches, good weather, scantily clad [insert preference here]) whilst all the bad bits you know of cities (pollution, bad traffic, angry people) get left behind in Melbourne and Sydney. Clearly this is an entirely unbiased view. You never quite know what to expe...

No really, that’s the whole idea and it goes back to my post from a couple of days ago about my new Pluralsight course [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/08/its-time-to-hack-yourself-first-with.html]. You see what normally happens when you create a course is that you hand over all the code used in the videos and then if you’re a plus subscriber [http://pluralsight.com/training/Products/ExerciseFiles] you get to download it and have a play. That’s just great, but the thing with my Hack Yourself First...

I’ve had some very interesting web security discussions recently: how many rounds of various hashing algorithms should be used for modern day password storage, if response header obfuscation is pointless in a world of easy HTTP fingerprinting and some of the deficiencies in the X-Frame-Options header, to name but a few. But every now and then I see something that brings me back down to earth and reminds me of the level that requires the most attention security wise. Allow me to present Exhibit A...

Earlier this year I was doing my usual trick of browsing websites and writing about things that were readily observable with regards to some rather ordinary security practices. When I say “readily observable” I’m talking about things such as cookies not flagged as HttpOnly [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/03/c-is-for-cookie-h-is-for-hacker.html] or SSL login forms embedded into HTTP pages [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/06/the-security-futility-that-is-embedding.html]. This stuff is just so easy to...

Earlier this year I wrote about 5 ways to implement HTTPS in an insufficient manner (and leak sensitive data) [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/04/5-ways-to-implement-https-in.html]. The entire premise of the post was that following a customer raising concerns about their SSL implementation, Top CashBack went on to assert that everything that needed to be protected, was. Except it wasn’t, at least not sufficiently and that’s the rub with SSL; it’s not about having it or not having it, it’s about un...

This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Ethical Hacking: SQL Injection" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/ethical-hacking-sql-injection]Put on your black hats folks, it’s time to learn some genuinely interesting things about SQL injection. Now remember – y’all play nice with the bits and pieces you’re about to read, ok? SQL injection is a particularly interesting risk for a few different reasons: 1. It’s getting increasingly harder to write vulnerable code due to frameworks...

Last week I had a video chat with the guys over on PaulDotCom [http://pauldotcom.com/] (which, of course is at pauldotcom.com [http://pauldotcom.com/]) on a whole bunch of app sec related issues, specifically around how developers can become more security aware. We also spoke quite a bit on how developers and security people can generally get along with each other better than what they tend to at present which IMHO, is often a rather corrosive current state of affairs. There's a bit of banter i...

As regular readers will know by now, I’m not real fond of virus call centre scammers. You know, the ones who call you up while you’re making dinner or bathing and kids and tell you they’re from Microsoft and that your PC is infected with blah blah polymorphic blah? There’s a bunch of material on this blog already under the Scam tag [https://www.troyhunt.com/search/label/Scam] where I’ve captured the experience and shared it for fun and education. Thing is, the bloody galahs keep calling me so I...

As part of my general wish to be a good netizen and advocate of website security, I made a responsible disclosure the other day, you know, the kind where you privately email an organisation and pass on security flaws in their online presence that they might not otherwise be aware of. Anyway, the response was, well, you decide: > To date we've not had a single security issue stemming from [insert risk I sent to them here] Really? Not a single one? Clearly whatever defences this particular org...