I couldn't get 2 days into the new decade without having to deal with ridiculous password criteria from Tik Tok followed by my phone automatically associating with what it thought was my washing machine whilst in a grocery store on the other side of the world (yep, you read that correctly). It somehow seems to just be reflective of how crazy online security is becoming in the modern era. On the plus side, Chrome is making some really positive changes to how it handles cookies so it's not all bad...

Cookies like to get around. They have no scruples about where they go save for some basic constraints relating to the origin from which they were set. I mean have a think about it: If a website sets a cookie then you click a link to another page on that same site, will the cookie be automatically sent with the request? Yes. What if an attacker sends you a link to that same website in a malicious email and you click that link, will the cookie be sent? Also yes. Last one: what if an attacker di...

Sitting down to do this one today I thought it would be brief, turns out a bit more ended up on the agenda than I expected. The GoGetSSL bit in particular was unfolding as I recorded and to their credit, they later apologised for their "rude messages" [https://twitter.com/gogetssl/status/1210842825992085506] which is a good sign. I still intend to finish writing up the blog post because the issues they've raised need tackling, but as with the Sophos example I also talk about, it's good to see a...

When is data "public"? And what does "public" even mean? Does it mean it's merely visible to the public? Or does it mean the public can do anything they like with it? This discussion comes up time and time again as it did with the huge leak of PDL data only last month [https://www.troyhunt.com/data-enrichment-people-data-labs-and-another-622m-email-addresses/] . For the most part, the impacted data in this incident came from LinkedIn, a service where by design we (including myself) publish perso...

Monday: 40C and lapping up the Gold Coast sunshine. Wednesday: -8C and lapping up... Juicy IPA [https://www.klokkco.no/en/beers/juicy-ipa/]! I'm back in Oslo and catching up with the locals including running a roundtable discussion for CSOs at Microsoft, visiting the Norwegian National Cyber Security Centre ( recently onboarded to HIBP [https://www.troyhunt.com/welcoming-the-norwegian-government-to-hibp/]) and chatting with Forbrukerrådet, the Norwegian Consumer Counsel. Plus, there's an all new...

Back in July last year, Scott Helme and I shipped a little pet project that tracked the world's largest websites not implementing HTTPS by default [https://www.troyhunt.com/why-no-https-heres-the-worlds-largest-websites-not-redirecting-insecure-requests/] . We called it Why No HTTPS? [https://whynohttps.com/] and it gave people a way to see the largest websites not taking transport layer security seriously. We also broke the list down on a country-by-country basis and it quickly became a means o...

I recorded this right before heading out for my final conference talk of the year at YOW! Melbourne where I was due to do the closing keynote of the event. That's now done, questions answered and beers drunk and I left the event feeling great. One of the things I get the most pleasure out of at conferences is hanging around talking to people so a big thanks to everyone who made the time today to stay back on a Friday evening and cap a very busy year of conferences off in this fashion. I'm going...

Last month, Disney launched their new streaming service Disney+ [https://www.disneyplus.com/]; "The best stories in the world, all in one place", apparently. The service was obviously rather popular because within days the tech (and mainstream) headlines were proclaiming that thousands of hacked Disney+ accounts were already for sale on hacking forums [https://www.zdnet.com/article/thousands-of-hacked-disney-accounts-are-already-for-sale-on-hacking-forums/] . This is becoming an alarmingly regul...

I'm presently on the YOW! conference tour which means doing the same keynote three times over in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. It's my first time back at YOW! since 2015 and it's always a nice way to wrap up the year, especially the Brisbane leg I'm on at the moment in my home state. That's kept me busy, but it's some tweets last week that have kept me entertained so I'm talking about those as well as some reflections on what is now 6 years of running HIBP. Next update I'll try and push out a...

It's summer! Yes, I know it's back to front for many of you but Dec 1 means it's sunnier than ever here. Regardless, this week I've been at DDD in Brisbane, written my 10 year old son Ari and I running kids coding clubs in Oslo (cold) and London (rainy) next month and the Swiss gov being on-boarded onto HIBP. Plus there's this week's sponsor IVPN and how tracking ain't tracking (that may be a bit of an old Aussieism [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7TUiMCeils]). Next week I'll come to you from...