Massive. Huge. Catastrophic. These are all headlines I’ve seen today that basically say we’re now well and truly screwed when it comes to security on the internet. Specifically though, it’s this [http://heartbleed.com/]: > The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. Every now and then in the world of security, something rather serious and broad-reaching happens and we all run around like head...

So here’s how it works, for those who are curious: every year on one of four quarterly intervals, Microsoft chooses a bunch of people to give a shiny award to, some of for the first time, some of them who are backing up from previous awards. Much discussion and analysis goes into who should get these (as far as I understand it), but in a nutshell, this is what it’s all about [http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/overview.aspx]: > The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is our way of say...

A little while back I caught up with Rob Sobers [https://twitter.com/rsobers] at Varonis [http://varonis.com] and had a good chat [http://blog.varonis.com/podcast-wi-fi-security-firesheep-pineapples-troy-hunt/] about wifi, XSS and various other bits and pieces related to security on the web today. I find chats like this are great for getting a candid sense of what’s going on in the industry; no scripting, no editing just straight talk on how we’re getting pwned online. Your browser does not s...

So I’m working with someone on a bit of Azure magic the other day and I’m talking them through how to use the management portal. Well at least I was trying to talk them through it but they weren’t seeing what I was seeing on the other end of the phone. It went a bit like this: Me: Ok, so just click on “All items”, it’s got that little symbol with all the squares next to it. Them: Uh, I’m not seeing it. Me: Ok, so what do you see? Them: It looks like the site is not compatible with IE 8. Me...

You know how the saying goes – if the product is free then you’re the product! This works for the likes of Facebook or Google because you get hit with targeted ads. It works for LinkedIn because they can then sell premium services that grant people access to the data they collect. Question is though, how do you become the product in an era of free wifi? The other day I noticed this for the first time in my local Woolworths supermarket down here in Australia: Free wifi makes a lot of sense i...

And now for my fourth Pluralsight instalment: more OWASP [http://pluralsight.com/training/courses/TableOfContents?courseName=web-security-owasp-top10-big-picture] ! Wait – hasn’t this been done already?! Yes and no. My first course from April last year was OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks for ASP.NET [http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses/TableOfContents/owasp-top10-aspdotnet-application-security-risks] and as the title suggests, it contains a heap of stuff on how OWASP applies to...

Heard of SSW’s FireBootCamp [http://firebootcamp.com/] before? It’s like those boot camps you see down at the local beaches and parks each morning, you know, the ones where a bunch of (apparently) willing participants are incessantly hammered by some drill-sergeant-like personal trainer for 30 minutes of blood, sweat and tears (I assume). But unlike this mob, the FireBootCamp folks don’t then towel off and chill for the rest of the day, instead they do this day after day, week after week for a w...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]I was rather proud of my little effort last week in producing The World’s Greatest Azure Demo [https://www.troyhunt.com/2014/03/the-worlds-greatest-azure-demo.html] and by all accounts, it’s been exceptionally well received (hey, what did you expect from the world’s greatest demo?!...

This high-level overview has now been turned into a full-blown Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]I had an opportunity recently, an opportunity to give a really impactful demonstration of Windows Azure to people who had not yet drunk from the Microsoft cloud fountain of love. These were people from the “old world” where men were men and infrastructure wasn’t a service, it was col...

So we were about halfway through watching the Wolf of Wall Street at the local cinema the other day and the iPhone starts buzzing like a mad thing. It’s on silent, of course, but you get that sense that something important is happening just by virtue of the frequency of the thing randomly jumping around in your pocket every few seconds. But it’s a night out with my wife – a rare night out – and I’m not about to risk a sneaky glance at the phone. Now this is a long movie (as awesome as it was),...