This is going to be a couple of weeks of polar opposite updates: This week I'm in Rockhampton, a regional centre in my home state where I'm surrounded by gum trees, chirping birds and a croc-invested river. Next week will be Washington DC where I'll have just finished testifying in front of US Congress. Whoa. That's the big story this week. This year. This career. It's both a massive thing and a walk in the park, the former because it's testifying in front of freakin' congress and the latter be...

Edit: I'm putting this up front as a lot of people are asking for it - the hearing will be live-streamed on YouTube and there's already an embedded video on the hearing page [https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/identity-verification-post-breach-world/] . There's a title I never expected to write! But it's exactly what it sounds like and on Thursday next week, I'll be up in front of US congress on the other side of the world testifying about the impact of data breaches [https://energycomme...

A bit of a "business as usual" week this one, but then this business is never really "usual"! I start out with a talk at McAfee's MPOWER conference in Sydney and a bit of chatter about some upcoming ones (including the one I still can't talk about... but will next week!) In terms of new things, I've now got my hands on an iPhone X so I spend a bunch of time talking about that. It only arrived yesterday so I'm still learning and forming opinions, but early feedback is that I love this phone! Wel...

I run a workshop titled Hack Yourself First [https://www.troyhunt.com/workshops/] in which people usually responsible for building web apps get to try their hand at breaking them. As it turns out, breaking websites is a heap of fun (with the obvious caveats) and people really get into the exercises. The first one that starts to push people into territory that's usually unfamiliar to builders is the module on XSS. In that module, we cover reflected XSS which relies on the premise of untrusted dat...

Loads of bits and pieces this week ranging from travel (including something truly awesome that I can't go into detail on just yet) to Report URI to HIBP. There's also the competition for the Lenovo ThinkPad where I talk about the 4 finalists and if you're reading this within about 18 hours of me posting it, you can still vote for them here: > It's time to vote! I've picked the best 4 projects using the @haveibeenpwned [https://twitter.com/haveibeenpwned?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] API to do some reall...

Here's something I hear quite a bit when talking about security things: > Our site isn't a target, it doesn't have anything valuable on it This is usually the retort that comes back in defence of some pretty shady practices and in the mind of the defendant, it's a perfectly reasonable position. They don't collect any credentials, they don't have any payment info and in many cases, the site is simply a static representation of content that rarely changes. So what upside is there for an attacke...

I've actually had a day off today. Well mostly - I am still writing this piece and publishing a data breach - but I've pretty much spent the day between pool, beach and jet ski hence my being a bit dishevelled today ? Be that as it may, it's been a massive week and that's primarily due to the launch of Report URI V2 and in particular, the announcement that I've joined Scott in running the project. I've contributed dollars, social leverage and expertise because I genuinely think it's an awesome...

It seems that there is no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to working around limitations within one's environment. For example, imagine you genuinely wanted to run a device requiring mains power in the centre of your inflatable pool - you're flat out of luck, right? Wrong! Or imagine there's a fire somewhere but the hydrant is on the other side of train tracks and you really want to put that fire out but trains have still gotta run too - what options are you left with? None? Wrong again...

What if I told you... that you can get visitors to your site to automatically check for a bunch of security issues. And then, when any are found, those visitors will let you know about it automatically. And the best bit is that you can set this up in a few minutes and add it to your site with zero risk. Or if you like, set it up so that it can automatically block certain types of attacks. It's not an expensive appliance, it's not a wacky browser extension and it's not some weird proprietary cod...

I'm between (short domestic) trips, I'm playing with my new iPad and I'm working on something really, really cool I'm going to be talking about next week. Seriously, this is a big thing that's been in the works for a while now and I'll be covering it in detail in the next update. For now, I've caught up on the whole IoT warning thing I totally overlooked last week. Frankly, it's just as well given how long that one was, the whole South Africa situation is still a very serious incident that has...