We chose this photo for the cover because this was when it all started. 18-year old Troy, having just discovered the web in early 1995 and chomping at the bit to do something with it. The full tale of what I first did (and how disastrous it ultimately became), is up front early in the book so I won't relay it here, but it's quite the story. The book title - Pwned - also seemed like a natural fit. Somehow, that funny name from gamer culture (that I only picked because it was easy to get the domain name!), has become synonymous with me personally. I'm even in the story of how it became the internet's favourite taunt, again, somehow....

I had a bunch of false starts with this one. I don't know if it was just OBS or something else, but we got there after several failed attempts and me resorting to reading Gov Parson's nutty tweets until it all started working. "Nutty" is a bit of a theme this week not just with the Gov, but particularly Thingiverse's extraordinarily poor handling of their data breach. Just watch (or listen), because it's pretty crazy stuff and it's still unfolding now 🍿 ReferencesI hit 4M HIBP subscribers! (sure, it's just a number, but it's a BIG round number!)Kids, devices, social media and parental supervision (tl;dr - use technical parental controls, but there ain't no substitute for a present and...

A lot of cyber things this week: loads of data breach (or "scrape", In LinkedIn's case) incidents, Windows 11 upgrade experiences and then bricking my house courtesy of a Home Assistant update that fundamentally changed the Tuya integration. So pretty much "same, same but different" to every other week 🙂 ReferencesI've done another podcast with 1Password ("Crocodile Shower Privacy Settings with Troy Hunt" - yep!)LinkedIn had hundreds of millions of records scraped (seems like multiple incidents earlier in the year just now circulating broadly)Twitch - wow! (that's a thread on what I learned as news of the incident unfolded before I then reviewed the data)The Windows 11 upgrade process has been... mixed (still just my laptop that won't...

Lots of little bits and pieces this week in a later and shorter than usual update. See the references for all the details, but plenty of cyber, some IoT weather station discussion and a bit of chatter around career and me deciding I want to do a "Hack Your Career More" talk once we all get back to doing events in person. Stay tuned for that last one in particular! ReferencesFor those asking, the weather station I'm using is a Davis Vantage Pro2 (really happy with this one, especially using the WeatherLink module to integrate into Home Assistant)Here's Scott's thread on the fallout of the Let's Encrypt expired root cert (we all knew it was coming, doesn't seem like...

5 years of weekly updates, wow. It's not like anything of much significance has happened in that time, right?! I've done these videos every single week without fail, through high and lows and no matter where I was in the world. As I say early on, they've helped keep me focused and whilst it hasn't always been easy to sit here and create them each week, I'm very glad I've done it. I'm also very glad Scott joined me on this one and we could have a bit of fun, shows with him always rate well and I'm sure we'll do many more like this over the next 5 years 😊 ReferencesScott's run-in with a patent troll is absolutely cringeworthy (and...

Never a dull moment! Most important stuff this week is talking about next week, namely because Scott Helme and I will be dong a live stream together for the 5th anniversary of my weekly update vids. We'd love questions and topics in advance or just drop in on the day, we're planning it for 18:00 Gold Coast time on Friday 24 which will be 09:00 that morning in London and ridiculous o'clock everywhere in the US. A few other random things in this weeks vid, the one worth following up on here though is the promised tweet about how to handle the Epik breach and the result so far is, well, let's just say I think I nailed...

An early one today as I made space in the schedule to get out on the water 😎 I'm really liking the new Apple AirTags, I'm disliking some of the international media coverage about Australia's COVID situation, another gov onto HIBP and a blog post I've wanted to write for a long time on biometrics. That last one in particularly I felt was really important as time and time again, I hear these irrational statements from people about the perceived "risks" of biometrics and in particular, the belief that you can somehow how representations of your body parts "stolen" in such a way that they can circumvent modern day auth controls. Nope and nope! ReferencesThe AirTag "anti-stalking" feature is pretty cool...

111 years ago almost to the day, a murder was committed which ultimately led to the first criminal trial to use fingerprints as evidence. We've all since watched enough crime shows to understand that fingerprints are unique personal biometric attributes and to date, no two people have ever been found to have a matching set. As technology has evolved, fingers (and palms and irises and faces) have increasingly been used as a means of biometric authentication. I'm writing this on a PC that uses a Verifi fingerprint reader. I'll probably continue to draft it from a comfy spot later on using my Lenovo laptop that has a built in reader. I'll also go backwards and forward between my iPhone and...

For the last few years, I've been welcoming national governments to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and granting them full and free access to domain-level searches via a dedicated API. Today, I'm very happy to welcome the Czech Republic's National Cyber and Information Security Agency who can now query their government domains along with the 26 other nations that have come before them. Data breaches impact all of us in one way or another, and government agencies are no exception. My hope is that in supporting the agencies that help protect us online, they're better equipped to do their jobs and we create a safer internet experience for all....

I'm  back from the most epic of holidays! How epic? Just have a scroll through the thread: I’m back! Went offline for most of the last week, pics and stories to follow 🐊 pic.twitter.com/hRUcKMwgGU — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 2, 2021 Which the Twitter client on my iPad somehow decided to break into 2 threads: At times this felt like navigating through a scene from Jurassic Park, just with wallabies rather than velociraptors 🦖 pic.twitter.com/VHa4kJw6kb — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 3, 2021 Holiday snaps aside, there was a heap of other stuff this week ranging from me actually reading a book to the impact of the Gun Trader breach to my personal favourite, Pwned Passwords...