A couple of different friends sent me over a link to an article about The Usability of Passwords [http://www.baekdal.com/tips/password-security-usability] this weekend, clearly thinking it would strike a chord. Well, let’s just say I was enthralled before I even finished the second line: > Security companies and IT people constantly tells us that we should use complex and difficult passwords. This is bad advice The crux of the article (and subsequent FAQ), is that so long as a password is s...

An unexpected email was waiting for me when I got off the plane from a recent work trip to Thailand on Saturday: > Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Developer Security technical communities during the past year. Given this was sent out on April 1st, one could be...

Edit (6 Oct 2020): It looks like the WCSA website has disappeared since originally writing this article and the domain is now parked on a porn site. The Google Code archive still exists so the blog post is still relevant, just be conscious that this project has obviously gone unloved for some time now and make take you to unexpected places. Ah, automation. Any time I find myself doing the same thing more than once, I get the inclination to bundle it all up into something that can begin happenin...

Banks don’t get it. Telcos struggle with it. Airlines haven’t got a clue. That’s right folks, its password time again. Earlier in the year I wrote a little post about the who’s who of bad password practices [https://www.troyhunt.com/2011/01/whos-who-of-bad-password-practices.html]. I named, I shamed and I got a resounding chorus of support. The point was made. But it still bugged me. Why were our banks and airlines so consistently forcing us to choose poor passwords? Why do they constrain our...

Let’s assume you log onto a bunch of different websites; Facebook, Gmail, eBay, PayPal probably some banking, maybe a few discussion forums and probably much, much more. Do you always create unique passwords such that you never use the same one twice? Ever? Do your passwords always use different character types such as uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation? Are they “strong”? If you can’t answer “yes” to both these questions, you’ve got yourself a problem. But the thing is,...

I must have struck a chord with the folks at Red Gate recently when I wrote about Automated database releases with TeamCity and Red Gate [https://www.troyhunt.com/2011/02/automated-database-releases-with.html]. Inadvertently, I managed to get this post out right in the final stages of their work on SQL Source Control 2 which added the ability to version static data. This was pretty opportune timing and caused me to rewrite – and significantly simplify – a fair swathe of the post. Clearly the po...

So I went along to the ThoughtWorks quarterly update on Continuous Delivery [http://www.thoughtworks.com/events/thoughtworks-quarterly-briefing-continuous-delivery] today. This took the form of a panel discussion with Martin Fowler [http://martinfowler.com/], Evan Bottcher [http://evan.bottch.com/] and Neal Ford [http://nealford.com/]. Smart guys, interesting topic and tantalising banner ad: The good news is that I didn’t hear anything that sounded too foreign. Either they were principles I’...

Databases have long been the poor cousin of the application tier when it comes to many of the processes we take for granted in the .NET world. Source control management, for example, is near ubiquitous for application files and there are several excellent VCS products which make versioning a breeze. Continuous integration is another practice which although not as common, is still frequently present in a robust application lifecycle. Of course the problem is that database objects don’t exist as...

Who remembers what it was like to build web apps on a shared development server? I mean the model where developers huddled around shared drives mapped to the same UNC path and worked on the same set of files with reckless abandon then fired them up in the browser right off the same sever. Maybe this is an entirely foreign concept to you but I certainly have vivid memories from the late 90s of building classic ASP apps (ye olde VB script) in Dreamweaver, side by side my fellow developers working...

It’s about assurance. It’s about establishing a degree of trust in a site’s legitimacy that’s sufficient for you to confidently transmit and receive data with the knowledge that it’s reaching its intended destination without being intercepted or manipulated in the process. Last week I wrote a (slightly) tongue-in-cheek post about the Who’s who of bad password practices [https://www.troyhunt.com/2011/01/whos-who-of-bad-password-practices.html]. I was critical of a number of sites not implementin...