What. A. Week. I've been in San Fran meeting with a whole bunch of potential purchasers for HIBP and it's been... intense. Daunting. Exciting. It's actually an amazing feeling to see my "little" project come to this where I'm sitting in a room with some of the most awesome tech companies whilst flanked by bankers in suits. I try and give a bit of insight into that in this week's video, keeping in mind of course that I'm a bit limited by how much detail I can go into right now. As the process unfolds I'll share more, but hopefully this will give you a little taste of what I'm going through at present. References Our password hashing has no...

It's the last one from Norway before heading off to the US and diving into the deep end of the Project Svalbard pool followed by Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas. That's off the back of the last week being focused on pushing out Pwned Passwords V5, loading several hundred million new records worth of new data breaches and finally launching something I've been very excited about for a long time now: auth on the HIBP API. I spend most of this week's update talking about that because it's such an important feature and I especially wanted to make it clear why there's now literally a financial price to pay for entry. All that and more in this week's...

The very first feature I added to Have I Been Pwned after I launched it back in December 2013 was the public API. My thinking at the time was that it would make the data more easily accessible to more people to go and do awesome things; build mobile clients, integrate into security tools and surface more information to more people to enable them to do positive and constructive things with the data. I highlighted 3 really important attributes at the time of launch: There is no authentication. There is no rate limiting. There is no cost. One of those changed nearly 3 years ago now - I had to add a rate limit. The other 2 are changing today...

So "Plan A" was to publish Pwned Passwords V5 on Tuesday but a last-minute check showed control characters had snuck in due to the quality (or lack thereof) of the source data. Scratch that and go to "Plan B" which was to push them out today but a last-minute check showed that my "improved" export script had screwed up the encoding and every single hash was wrong. "Plan C" is now to push them out on the weekend with everything working correctly. Hopefully. If I don't screw anything up again... The constant challenge I've faced over the last few years is the massive amount of multi-tasking required to do all the things I'm presently doing. I touched on this in...

Almost 2 years ago to the day, I wrote about Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era. This wasn't so much an original work on my behalf as it was a consolidation of advice from the likes of NIST, the NCSC and Microsoft about how we should be doing authentication today. I love that piece because so much of it flies in the face of traditional thinking about passwords, for example: Don't impose composition rules (upper case, lower case, numbers, etc)Don't mandate password rotation (enforced changing of it every few months)Never implement password hintsAnd of most relevance to the discussion here today, don't allow people to use passwords that have already been exposed in a data breach....

After a very non-stop Cyber Week in Israel, I'm back in Oslo working through the endless emails and other logistics related to Project Svalbard. In my haste this week, I put out a really poorly worded tweet which I've tried to clarify in this week's video. On more positive news, the Austrian government came on board HIBP and my MVP status got renewed for the 9th time. I also wanted to talk this week about some of the stats from HIBP I've been preparing as part of the acquisition. There's a bunch of really interesting numbers in there (for me at least) and rather than just keeping them locked away in an information memorandum, I thought I'd share them with...

I've become especially reflective of my career this year, especially as Project Svalbard marches forward and I look back on what it's taken to get here. Especially as I have more discussions around the various turning points in my professional life, there's one that stands out above most others: my first MVP award. This is not a path I planned, in fact when I originally got that award I referred to myself as The Accidental MVP. But I also think that's the best way to earn any of the awards I've since received; not by setting out with the award as the goal, but rather focusing on the activities for which the award is granted. I wrote a blog people...

Early last year, I announced that I was making HIBP data on government domains for the UK and Australia freely accessible to them via searches of their respective TLDs. The Spanish government followed a few months later with each getting unbridled access to search their own domains via an authenticated API. As I explained in that initial post, the rationale was to help the departments tasked with looking after the exposure of their digital assets by unifying search and monitoring capabilities so the task could be performed centrally rather than having the effort replicated over and over again by individual departments. Before this effort, there were hundreds of gov domains being manually monitored by separate departments across those governments -...

Something totally new this week - Israel! I spent the week in Tel Aviv at Cyber Week, a massive infosec conference where I shared the keynote stage with an amazing array of speakers including many from three letter acronym departments and even PM Benjamin Netanyahu. It's funny how on the one hand an event like this can be so completely different to the very familiar NDC Oslo scene I was in just last week yet by the same token, I'm up there talking about all the same stuff and doing my usual thing. This week, I'm talking about Israel, the Cyber Week event and how things are tracking with Project Svalbard (spoiler - bloody busy!) I also get a ticket...

So first things first - my patience for the Instamics we're wearing just reached zero. One of them recorded and one of them didn't which means we've had to fallback to audio captured by the iPhone I was recording from so apologies it's sub-par. I ended up just uploading the unedited clip direct from the phone because frankly, after trying to recover the non-existent audio both my time and patience were well into the red. Be that as it may, there's video, audio and a narrative to tell both around the NDC event Scott and I are at and the progress of "Project Svalbard". I'm trying to share as much as I can about that process as things progress and...