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Weekly Update 407

It's a long one this week, in part due to the constant flood of new breaches and disclosures I discuss. I regularly have disclosure notices forwarded to me by followers who find themselves in new breaches, and it's always fascinating to hear how they're worded. You get a real sense of how much personal ownership a company is taking, how much blame they're putting back on the hackers and increasingly, how much they've been written by lawyers. That last one, in particular, seems to have a knack fo...

The State of Data Breaches, Part 2: The Trilogy of Players

Last week, I wrote about The State of Data Breaches and got loads of feedback. It was predominantly sympathetic to the position I find myself in running HIBP, and that post was mostly one of frustration: lack of disclosure, standoffish organisations, downplaying breaches and the individual breach victims themselves making it worse by going to town on the corporate victims. But the other angle that's been milling around in my brain is the one represented by the image here: Running HIBP has b...

Weekly Update 406

Why does it need to be a crazy data breach week right when I'm struggling with jet lag?! I came home from Europe just as a bunch of the Snowflake-sourced breaches started being publicly dumped, and things went a little crazy. Lots of data to review, lots of media enquiries and many discussions with impacted individuals, breached companies, incident response folks and law enforcement agencies. This situation is wreaking absolute havoc, and I suspect it has a way to run yet with only a small slice...

The State of Data Breaches

I've been harbouring some thoughts about the state of data breaches over recent months, and I feel they've finally manifested themselves into a cohesive enough story to write down. Parts of this story relate to very sensitive incidents and parts to criminal activity, not just on behalf of those executing data breaches but also very likely on behalf of some organisations handling them. As such, I'm not going to refer to any specific incidents or company names, rather I'm going to speak more gener...

Weekly Update 405

Ah, sunshine! As much as I love being back in Norway, the word "summer" is used very loosely there. Not as much in Greece, however, which is just spectacular: Finally escaped the bitterly cold Norwegian summer for something… warmer 🇬🇷 pic.twitter.com/jk9knZvJar — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) June 17, 2024 3 nights in Mykonos, 2 in Santorini and I'm pushing this post out just before our second night in Athens before embarking on the long journey home. It's been an experience, between the NDC ta...

Weekly Update 404

What a week! The NDC opening keynote and 3D printing talk both went off beautifully, the latter being the first time for 11-year old Elle on stage: And the pro shots are really cool 😎 pic.twitter.com/ud7ad0pF1x — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) June 15, 2024 Videos of both will be available in the coming weeks so stay tuned for them. For now, we're at the end of a mostly cold and rainy Norwegian summer trip, heading to the sunny Greek isles for next week's update 😎 References 1. Sponsored...

Weekly Update 403

I just watched back a little segment from this week's video and somehow landed at exactly the point where I said "I am starting to lose my patience with repeating the same thing over and over again" (about 46 mins if you want to skip to it), which is precisely how I wanted to start this post. In running HIBP for the last 10 and a bit years, there have been so many breaches where people have asked for the data within them beyond just the email address to be made available. As I say in the video,...

Telegram Combolists and 361M Email Addresses

Last week, a security researcher sent me 122GB of data scraped out of thousands of Telegram channels. It contained 1.7k files with 2B lines and 361M unique email addresses of which 151M had never been seen in HIBP before. Alongside those addresses were passwords and, in many cases, the website the data pertains to. I've loaded it into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) today because there's a huge amount of previously unseen email addresses and based on all the checks I've done, it's legitimate data. That...

Weekly Update 402

What a week! It was Ticketmaster that consumed the bulk of my time this week with the media getting themselves into a bit of a frenzy over a data breach that at the time of recording, still hadn't even been confirmed. But as predicted in the video, confirmation came late on a Friday arvo and since that time we've learned a lot more about just how bad the situation is. I'm going to save that discussion for Weekly Update 403 and between the time of writing this and going live, I'm sure we'll learn...

Operation Endgame

Today we loaded 16.5M email addresses and 13.5M unique passwords provided by law enforcement agencies into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) following botnet takedowns in a campaign they've coined Operation Endgame. That link provides an excellent overview so start there then come back to this blog post which adds some insight into the data and explains how HIBP fits into the picture. Since 2013 when I kicked off HIBP as a pet project, it has become an increasingly important part of the security posture...