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Handling people's personal data is sensitive business

Last week I wrote about how 8 million GitHub profiles were leaked from GeekedIn's MongoDB [https://www.troyhunt.com/8-million-github-profiles-were-leaked-from-geekedins-mongodb-heres-how-to-see-yours/] which is always a risk when you expose a DB with no auth whatsoever! For any other website, this would be a typical data breach scenario in that info that was meant to remain private was made public. However, GeekedIn lost publicly accessible GitHub data so whilst yes, there was a breach, no, it...

Ad blockers are part of the problem

Earlier this year, I wrote about bad user experiences on websites [https://www.troyhunt.com/its-2016-already-how-are-websites-still/] and foremost among these were the shitty things some sites do with ads. Forbes' insistence that you watch one before manually clicking through to the story, full screen and popover ads and ads that would take over your screen after you started reading the article were all highlighted. Unanimously, we hate this experience. Because the aforementioned experiences ar...

Weekly update 9

Lots on this week and I'm very happy to have finally got myself organised and set up an audio podcast feed. It's getting a heap of downloads already so obviously, people did actually want it and frankly, I'm sorry I didn't get it organised earlier! That and much more in this week's update iTunes podcast [https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/troy-hunts-weekly-update-podcast/id1176454699] | Google Play Music podcast [https://goo.gl/app/playmusic?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googlepl...

8 million GitHub profiles were leaked from GeekedIn's MongoDB - here's how to see yours

Let me make it crystal clear in the opening paragraph: this incident is not about any sort of security vulnerability on GitHub's behalf, rather it relates to a trove of data from their site which was inappropriately scraped and then inadvertently exposed due to a vulnerability in another service. My data. Probably your data if you're in the software industry. Millions of people's data. On Saturday, a character in the data trading scene popped up and sent me a 594MB file called geekedin.net_mirr...

Data breach claims are often poorly researched, unsubstantiated and ultimately fake

I have multiple Yahoo data breaches. I have a Twitter data breach. I have Facebook data breaches. I know they are data breaches from those sources because people told me they are, ergo, they're data breaches. Except they're not - they're all fake. Problem is though, fake data breaches don't make for a very good headline nor do they give you something worth trading; for many people, it's not in their best interests to establish what's fake and what's not. Earlier this year I wrote about how I ve...

My weekly updates are now available as an audio podcast

I've been doing the weekly updates [https://www.troyhunt.com/tag/weekly-update/] for a couple of months now and by all accounts, they've been very well-received. One of the early pieces of feedback I got though was that I should also publish them as an audio podcast so that people can listen to them in the car or while doing whatever else it is that people do while listening to syndicated content via the likes of iTunes. Yesterday I finally got around to getting all this setup by using the Omn...

Disqus' mixed content problem and fixing it with a CSP

I write a blog with a lot of security things on it so understandably, it upsets me somewhat when my site throws security warnings: I'd had a number of people report this and indeed I'd seen it myself, albeit transiently. Diving into the console, I found the source of the problem: Who the hell is Circulate?! And what are they doing in my blog? Let's find out: Right... I don't have any ads on my blog these days (just sponsor messages) so there shouldn't be any third-party monetisation goi...

New Pluralsight course: Exploring the Internet of Vulnerabilities

I've done a number of "Play by Play" courses for Pluralsight this year on a range of topics including Social Engineering with my mate Lars Klint [http://app.pluralsight.com/courses/play-by-play-social-engineering], Deconstructing the Hack with my mate Gary Eimerman [http://app.pluralsight.com/courses/play-by-play-ethical-hacking-deconstructing-hack] , Modernizing Your Deployment Strategy with Octopus Deploy with my mate Damo Brady [http://app.pluralsight.com/courses/play-by-play-modernize-with-...

Weekly update 8 (backyard edition)

Let's get this out of the way early - I did not shoot this video on a green screen! When I first watched it, I couldn't believe how amazing the picture quality was and the first thought I had when I saw it was the green screen one. The new iPhone 7 Plus is a major part of that, but I got out early when it was quiet and got the light just right too. I posted a still to Twitter earlier today and someone asked what lighting I use. Uh, "the sun", that is all. Anyway, a bunch of things worth discuss...

The Capgemini leak of Michael Page data via publicly facing database backup

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the leak of data from the Red Cross' Blood Service down here in Australia [https://www.troyhunt.com/the-red-cross-blood-service-australias-largest-ever-leak-of-personal-data/] . Many people were shocked that you could have a situation where troves of personal data were obtainable not through any advanced hacking technique, but by merely downloading a database backup from the website it had been published to. It's literally that simple and it's shockingly commo...