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Weekly Update 209

More IoT, more cyber and more Q&A so yeah, business as usual this week. More specifically, a lot of this week's update talks about VPNs and where they still make sense with so much HTTPS all over the place these days. As I say in the vid, blog posts like the VPN one I did this week are often done to help me get my thoughts on a topic straight and a lot of things became a lot clearer for me in doing that. The headline figure out of that post IMHO is that only 2.3% of websites are forcing all conn...

Padlocks, Phishing and Privacy; The Value Proposition of a VPN

I want a "secure by default" internet with all the things encrypted all the time such that people can move freely between networks without ever needing to care about who manages them or what they're doing with them. I'm a massive proponent of Let's Encrypt's and Cloudflare's missions to secure the web and of browser paradigms such as HSTS [https://www.troyhunt.com/understanding-http-strict-transport/] and upgrade-insecure-requests via content security policies [https://www.troyhunt.com/the-6-st...

Weekly Update 208

The highlight of my week was absolutely getting the Shelly 1 units behind a couple of my light switches working as I'd always dreamed. It just opens up so many automation possibilities that I'm really excited about what I might do in the future with them now. When I get the place to a standard I'm happy with, I'll definitely do a good walkthrough and show how it all works. Until then, this week's update has some general infosec stuff but chief amongst that is the Giggle app situation. So many la...

Weekly Update 207

I kicked off a little bit earlier on this one in order to wrap up before the Burning Minds keynote, and it's interesting to see just how much difference that little sliver of sunlight makes to the video quality. Check the very start of the video versus the very end; this is the sunset slipping through the crack in the fully drawn blinds, make a massive difference. In other news, I'm talking about how I prepare my talks and deliver them timed down to the minute (I had 20 seconds spare on this one...

We Didn't Encrypt Your Password, We Hashed It. Here's What That Means:

You've possibly just found out you're in a data breach. The organisation involved may have contacted you and advised your password was exposed but fortunately, they encrypted it. But you should change it anyway. Huh? Isn't the whole point of encryption that it protects data when exposed to unintended parties? Ah, yes, but it wasn't encrypted it was hashed and therein lies a key difference: > Saying that passwords are “encrypted” over and over again doesn’t make it so. They’re bcrypt hashes so g...

Weekly Update 206

Since I recorded this morning, I've had an absolute breakthrough - I CAN OPEN MY GARAGE DOOR WITH MY WATCH [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1299248866189950978]! I know, I know, it shouldn't be this hard and that's a lot of the point I'm making in this week's video. Having said that, some parts have been hard because I've made simple mistakes [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1299164660617211905], but the nature of the IoT ecosystem as it stands today predisposes you to mistakes because t...

Weekly Update 205

Between still feeling a little groggy after hitting the water hard on an early wake boarding session then my camera overheating and shutting down towards the end of the live stream, this wasn't the smoothest of weekly updates, I still got across everything I needed to. I'm especially excited about those Shelly 1 units for cheaply IoT'ing existing lights and I'm hoping to have some of that up and running next week. Until then, here's episode 205: [https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/troy-hunts-w...

Weekly Update 204

It's an extra early one this week and on review, I do look a bit... dishevelled! I run through a whole bunch of things from this week's Twitter timeline and there's some great audience questions this week too so thanks very much everyone for the engagement. Next we'll do it at the other end of the day again and I'm sure there'll be a heap of new stuff to cover before then. [https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/troy-hunts-weekly-update-podcast/id1176454699] [https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com...

Weekly Update 203

What. A. Week. I've been absolutely non-stop publishing data breaches to HIBP whilst simultaneously putting in place the framework to start advising NordVPN on their cybers and open sourcing the HIBP code base at the same time (and a bunch of other more boring stuff that didn't make the cut). That's all explained in this week's update so I won't drill further into it here, there's obviously a couple of big announcements so if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below and I'll eithe...

I'm Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Code Base

Let me just cut straight to it: I'm going to open source the Have I Been Pwned code base. The decision has been a while coming and it took a failed M&A process to get here, but the code will be turned over to the public for the betterment of the project and frankly, for the betterment of everyone who uses it. Let me explain why and how. HIBP is a Community Project I've been giving a great deal of thought to how I want this project to evolve lately, especially in the wake of the M&A process that...