Just over 6 years ago, I received my first Microsoft MVP award [https://www.troyhunt.com/accidental-mvp/]. It was unexpected, in part because I'd only started doing anything community facing 18 months earlier. But it rated - people were finding what I was doing genuinely useful and that award was an absolutely pivotal moment which helped define what I do today. This weekend, I got the (still) eagerly awaited email for the seventh time: > Giddy up! 7 years running ? pic.twitter.com/okTP6GTk5n [...

Into week 5 of travel now and I'm in Southampton on the south coast of England. The family holidaying is over and it's back to workshops and user groups for the remainder of the trip both here in the UK then back in the Netherlands next week. Despite the schedule, I managed to pump out a quick blog post on what remains one of the most astoundingly insane security / privacy implementation I've seen - Strawberrynet. This has to be seen to be believed and the backstory I talk about in this week's...

A little while back, I wrote about Website enumeration insanity [https://www.troyhunt.com/website-enumeration-insanity-how-our-personal-data-is-leaked/] and how our personal data was being mishandled. In a nutshell, an enumeration risk boils down to a feature on a website allowing anyone to "ask" if a user exists on the website with the site then returning a positive or negative response. For example, to this day you can go to Adult Friend Finder's password reset page [https://adultfriendfinder...

Another week abroad, this time in the Netherlands and fortunately a combination of time out with the family and just a single workshop. Still, that workshop raised an interesting question around data retention in backups and how the right to erasure under GDPR will be handled. I discuss that from my tranquil little getaway in Leiden plus ponder what would happen if all my security decisions were one day put on public display. That and more in this week's update, then it's off to London! iTunes...

This has probably been the most relentless week I've had in one place since... I dunno. Forever? It was all in Oslo and all centred around the NDC event but it meant kicking off with a massive 2 day workshop (50 people - a record!), then an OWASP user group (followed by much beer), then workshop Tuesday, family arriving, social NDC event, event kick-off Wednesday, family sightseeing, a Pluralsight recording, shrimp cruise that night, NDC talk on Thursday, a short "how I failed talk" that night f...

It's week 2 of my 6-week European summer tour and I'm in Trondheim Norway which frankly, is a pretty awesome place: > Awesome spot ? pic.twitter.com/wBAYGShQNH [https://t.co/wBAYGShQNH] — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) June 9, 2017 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/873060637735231488] Being busy with workshops and talks means I'm always going somewhere or doing something so time is a bit limited, but I still managed to get out my Security Sense column this week. I also give some updates on some obse...

I'm in Belgium! After 35 hours of travel to Porto in Portugal then 2 days of workshop plus a user group there, I'm now in Leuven which is in the home of epic Belgium beer. I'm now into day 2 of another workshop here after having done a user group on Azure last night so it's turning into a very long week. Not a lot of new stuff to talk about blog wise, but I share what it's like doing these events and some of the things I learn along the way. iTunes podcast [https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/t...

I've been at the AusCERT conference [https://conference.auscert.org.au/] this week and whilst I scored a nomination for "Individual Excellence in Information Security", it wasn't meant to be this year (or the last 2 times!) but I did get a shiny certificate :) It was a great event and I really enjoyed meeting a heap of very cool people and doing a brand new talk on responsible disclosure. I'll share that once it's publicly accessible, AusCERT usually put these out to the world and I was really h...

You know what people really like? Government regulation! ...crickets... Ok, maybe not so much, but this one is actually really important. The General Data Protection Regulation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation] is an EU reg that kicks in on 25 May 2018 so we've got bang on a year to get organised. It's important within the EU because it relates to how data of their citizens and residents is handled and it's important outside the EU because the regulation can im...

Hang on - where did my week go?! WannaCry came out of the blue and accosted a big whack of my time starting first thing Saturday. And then, just as it was quietening down, I go and write about not turning off Windows Update and holy shit, did people come out of the woodwork to complain about that! Seriously, just read some of the comments there and the anger directed towards what (in my experience) is usually a pretty seamless process is palpable. More than the objections to updates themselves,...