Security

Subject: Data Breach of [your service] Hi, my name is Troy Hunt and I run the ethical data breach notification service known as Have I Been Pwned: https://haveibeenpwned.com People regularly send me data from compromised systems which are being traded amongst individuals who collect breaches. Recently, a collection of data allegedly taken from the [your service] was sent to me and I believe there’s a high likelihood your site was indeed hacked. The data consists of an extensive number of records containing personal information. I wanted to send you what’s been sent to me and give you the opportunity to respond before I notify my subscribers impacted in the incident. Could someone responsible for information security...

We're live! Video embedded below: Under normal circumstances, we'd be sitting on a stage, beers in hands and doing our (I think we can use this term now) "world famous" Cyber-broken talk. It's like Top gear for nerds. @troyhunt #NDCLondon pic.twitter.com/wxzhM6uOCG — HarryMiller (@HarryMillerr) January 31, 2019 Scott and I have been doing these for a couple of years now, initially as a bit of a space-filler at NDC Security on the Gold Coast. We did it again at NDC Oslo a few months later, turned it into the party talk in London earlier last year (tweet above) and have continued to do it at every NDC event we've done since. Normally, it'd look something...

Of course it's virtual because let's face it, nobody is going anywhere at the moment. Plenty of you aren't even going into an office any more let alone fronting up to a conference with hundreds or even thousands of people. That sucks for you because you end up both missing out on events and sooner or later, suffering from cabin fever (I've always found that difficult across many years of remote work). It also sucks for companies like NDC Conferences whose entire livelihood is running the very events that people are now avoiding at all costs. It's a crisis, no doubt, yet... Crisitunity! The opportunity in all this is that we take the events online, massively expand their reach and...

This is a blog post about disclosure, specifically the difficulty with doing it in a responsible fashion as the reporter whilst also ensuring the impacted organisation behaves responsibly themselves. It's not a discussion we should be having in 2020, a time of unprecedented regulatory provisions designed to prevent precisely the sort of behaviour I'm going to describe in this post. Here you're going to see - blow by blow - just how hard it is for those of us with the best of intentions to deal with organisations who have a very different set of priorities. This is a post about how hard disclosure remains and how Surebet247's behaviour now has them experiencing the full blown Streisand effect. It began...

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 directs you to a malicious website and upon visiting it your browser makes a post request to the original website that set the cookie...

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. We called it Why No HTTPS? 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 of highlighting security gaps and serving as a "list of shame". I've had many organisations reach out and ask to be removed once they'd done their TLS things properly so clearly, the site is driving the right behaviour. Today, we're happy to share the first update since November last year. The Web is More Secure More...

Last month, Disney launched their new streaming service Disney+; "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. This is becoming an alarmingly regular pattern with online services, the cause of which was soon confirmed by Disney: Disney says that there is “no indication” of a security breach on Disney+, and that the source of the problem might be a so-called “credential stuffing” attack, in which hackers obtain passwords and usernames from Dark Web databases, and then use a brute force method to see if those passwords and usernames...

You know how banks really, really want to avoid their customers falling victim to phishing scams? And how they put a heap of effort into education to warn folks about the hallmarks of phishing scams? And how banks are the shining beacons of light when it comes to demonstrating security best practices? Ok, that final one might be a bit of a stretch, but the fact remains that people have high expectations of how banks should communicate to ensure that they themselves don't come across as phishers: Just a good old phish. see that there is no slash after .com.au? Very convincing but banks will never send texts like these. Cc @troyhunt @NAB pic.twitter.com/hCW5ADLo0O — Sebastian...

Allow me to be controversial for a moment: arbitrary password restrictions on banks such as short max lengths and disallowed characters don't matter. Also, allow me to argue with myself for a moment: banks shouldn't have these restrictions in place anyway. I want to put forward cases for both arguments here because seeing both sides is important. I want to help shed some light on why this practice happens and argue pragmatically both for and against. But firstly, let's just establish what's happening: People are Upset About Arbitrary RestrictionsThis is actually one of those long-in-draft blog posts I finally decided to finish after seeing this tweet earlier on in the week: My bank tells me that their exactly-5-digit password policy...

Almost one year ago now, I declared extended validation certificates dead. The entity name had just been removed from Safari on iOS, it was about to be removed from Safari on Mojave and there were indications that Chrome would remove it from the desktop in the future (they already weren't displaying it on mobile clients). The only proponents of EV seemed to be those selling it or those who didn't understand how reliance on the absence of a positive visual indicator was simply never a good idea in the first place. The writing might have been on the wall a year ago, but the death warrant is now well and truly inked with both Chrome and Firefox killing it stone...