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Weekly Update 379

It's that time of the year again, time to head from the heat to the cold as we jump on the big plane(s) back to Europe. The next 4 weekly updates will all be from places of varying degrees colder than home, most of them done with Scott Helme too so they'll be a little different to usual. For now, here's a pretty casual Christmas edition, see you next week from the other side 🙂 References 1. Sponsored by: Unpatched devices keeping you up at night? Kolide can get your entire fleet updated...

Weekly Update 378

I'd say the balloon fetish segment was the highlight of this week's video. No, seriously, it's a moment of levity in an otherwise often serious industry. It's still a bunch of personal info exposed publicly and that suchs regardless of the nature of the site, but let's be honest, the subject matter did make for some humorous comments 🤣 References 1. Sponsored by: Identity theft isn’t cheap. Secure your family with Aura the #1 rated proactive protection that helps keep you safe online. G...

Weekly Update 377

10 years later... 🤯 Seriously, how did this thing turn into this?! It was the humblest of beginning with absolutely no expectations of anything, and now it's, well, massive! I'm a bit lost for words if I'm honest, I hope the chat with Charlotte adds some candour to this week's update, she's seen this thing grow since before its first birthday, through the hardest times and the best times and now lives and breathes HIBP day in day out with me. I hope you enjoy this video, and we'd both love to h...

A Decade of Have I Been Pwned

A decade ago to the day, I published a tweet launching what would surely become yet another pet project that scratched an itch, was kinda useful to a few people but other than that, would shortly fade away into the same obscurity as all the other ones I'd launched over the previous couple of decades: It's alive! "Have I been pwned?" by @troyhunt is now up and running. Search for your account across multiple breaches http://t.co/U0QyHZxP6k — Have I Been Pwned (@haveibeenpwned) December 4, 201...

Weekly Update 376

I'm irrationally excited about the new Prusa 3D printer on order, and I think that's mostly to do with planning for the NDC Oslo talk I plan to do with Elle, my 11-year old daughter. I'm all for getting the kids exposure not just to tech, but also to being able to talk to others about tech and involving them in conference talks since a young age has been a big part of that. But what I'm especially excited about is that this won't just be an "aw, isn't it cute seeing kids talk at a conference" ki...

Weekly Update 375

For a weekly update with no real agenda, we sure did spend a lot of time talking about the ridiculous approach Harvey Norman took to dealing with heavy traffic on Black Friday. It was just... unfathomable. A bunch of people chimed into the tweet thread and suggested it may have been by design, but they certainly wouldn't have set out to achieve the sorts of headlines that adorned the news afterwards. Who knows, but it made for entertaining content this week 🙂 References 1. Sponsored by:...

Weekly Update 374

Think about it like this: in 2015, we all lost our proverbial minds at the idea of the Kazakhstan government mandating the installation of root certificates on their citizens' devices. We were outraged at the premise of a government mandating the implementation of a model that could, at their bequest, allow them to intercept traffic without any transparency or accountability. The EFF said the following at the time: If the country's ruling regime were to successfully implement this plan, it woul...

Acuity Who? Attempts and Failures to Attribute 437GB of Breached Data

Allegedly, Acuity had a data breach. That's the context that accompanied a massive trove of data that was sent to me 2 years ago now. I looked into it, tried to attribute and verify it then put it in the "too hard basket" and moved onto more pressing issues. It was only this week as I desperately tried to make some space to process yet more data that I realised why I was short on space in the first place: Ah, yeah - Acuity - that big blue 437GB blob. What follows is the process I went throu...

Weekly Update 373

Most of this week's video went on the scraped (and faked) LinkedIn data, but it's the ransomware discussion that keeps coming back to mind. Even just this morning, 2 days after recording this live stream, I ended up on nation TV talking about the DP World security incident and whilst we don't have any confirmation yet, it has all the hallmarks of another ransomware case. In advance of that interview, I was trawling through various ransomware Tor sites and the volume of big names appearing there...

Hackers, Scrapers & Fakers: What's Really Inside the Latest LinkedIn Dataset

Edit (1 day later): After posting this, the party responsible for leaking the data turned around and said "that was only a small part of it, here's the whole thing", and released records encompassing a further 14M records. I've added those into HIBP and will shortly be re-sending notifications to people monitoring domains as the count of impacted addresses will likely have changed. Everything else about the subsequent dataset is consistent with what you'll read below in terms of structure, patte...