It should be so simple: you're a customer who wants to purchase something so you whip out the credit card and buy it. I must have done this thousands of times, and it's easy! I've bought stuff with plastic credit cards, stuff with Apple Pay on my phone and watch and, like all of us, loads of stuff simply by entering credit card details into a website. A lot of that has been business expenses for which I've obtained a receipt and then claimed back, either in my joyful life of independence or in a...

Whilst there definitely weren't 2.x billion people in the National Public Data breach, it is bad. It really is fascinating how much data can be collected and monetised in this fashion and as we've seen many times before, data breaches do often follow. The NPD incident has received a huge amount of exposure this week and as is often the case, there are some interesting turns; partial data sets, an actor turned data broker, a disclosure notice (almost) nobody can load and bad actors peddling parti...

I decided to write this post because there's no concise way to explain the nuances of what's being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. Usually, it's easy to articulate a data breach; a service people provide their information to had someone snag it through an act of unauthorised access and publish a discrete corpus of information that can be attributed back to that source. But in the case of National Public Data, we're talking about a data aggregator most people had never heard o...

When is a breach a breach? If it's been breached then re-breached, is the second incident still a breach? Here's what the masses said when I asked if they'd want to know when something like this happened to their data: If you're in a breach and your data is aggregated by a third party, then *they* have a breach that discloses your data (again), would you want to know? Should this constitute a notifiable breach? — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) August 5, 2024 And what if that second incident wasn't...

The ongoing scourge that is spyware (or, as it is commonly known, "stalkerware"), and the subsequent breaches that so often befall them continue to amaze me. More specifically, it's the way they tackle the non-consensual spying aspect of the service which, on the one hand is represented as a big "no-no" but on the others hand, the likes of Spytech in this week's update literally have a dedicated page for! Ok, so they say "get consent first" on the page, but only after pre-positioning the service...

TL;DR — Tens of millions of credentials obtained from info stealer logs populated by malware were posted to Telegram channels last month and used to shake down companies for bug bounties under the misrepresentation the data originated from their service. How many attempted scams do you get each day? I woke up to yet another "redeem your points" SMS this morning, I'll probably receive a phone call from "my bank" today (edit: I was close, it was "Amazon Prime" 🤷‍♂️) and don't even get me started...

Who would have thought that just a few hours after recording the previous week's video, the world would descend into what has undoubtedly become the largest IT outage we've ever seen: I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 19, 2024 By virtue of the CrowdStrike incident occurring in friendly office hours for my corner of the world, I was able to get a thread on it going pretty early on. That tweet above has been s...

Just over 13 years ago, Microsoft gave me my first "Most Valuable Professional" award. Out of the blue, as far as I was concerned. It wasn't something I'd planned for and it certainly wasn't something I'd expected, but it has become a cornerstone of my professional identity. Indulge me while I go off on a bit of a tangent here: like the other things in my professional life that have turned into a success, the things I did to earn that first MVP award were things I was going to do anyway. Things...

It feels weird to be writing anything right now that isn't somehow related to Friday's CrowdStrike incident, but given I recorded this video just a few hours before all hell broke loose, it'll have to wait until next week. This week, the issue that really has me worked up is data breach victim notification or more specifically, lack thereof. Following my time in Melbourne and Canberra during the week where I spent a bunch of time with smart people close to the legal, political and law enforcemen...

I get the frustration and anger those working at organisations that have been breached feel, and I've seen it firsthand in my communications with them on so many prior occasions. They're the victim of a criminal act and they're rightly outraged. However... thinking back to similar examples to The Heritage Foundation situation this week, I can't think of a single case where losing your mind and becoming abusive has ever worked out well. In fact, it usually just has the effect of losing the victim...