Security

I love security. I love privacy. Consequently, it will come as no surprise that I love tools that help people achieve those objectives. Equally, I have no patience for false promises, and I've been very vocal about my feelings there: But one of them is literally called “Secure VPN”, how is this possible?! “Are You Using These VPN Apps? Personal Info Of 20 Million Users Leaked: That’s 1.2TB Data” https://t.co/BPDww70Pgo — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 20, 2020 VPNs are a great example of where a tool can be used to enhance security and privacy but often, they fall short of delivering on the promise. When you use a VPN, you're trusting a third party with...

I love beer. This comes as no surprise to regular followers, nor should it come as a surprise that I maintain an Untappd account, logging my beer experiences as I (used to 😢) travel around the world partaking in local beverages. When I received an email from someone over that way who happened to be a happy Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) user and wanted some cyber-assistance, I was intrigued. You'll never believe what happened next... The tl;dr is that someone with a BeerAdvocate account was convinced the service had been pwned as they'd seen evidence of an email address and password they'd used on the service being abused. They reached out to my guy (we'll call him that for...

The situation in Minneapolis at the moment (and many other places in the US) following George Floyd's death is, I think it's fair to say, extremely volatile. I wouldn't even know where to begin commentary on that, but what I do have a voice on is data breaches which prompted me to tweet this out earlier today: I'm seeing a bunch of tweets along the lines of "Anonymous leaked the email addresses and passwords of the Minneapolis police" with links and screen caps of pastes as "evidence". This is almost certainly fake for several reasons: — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) May 31, 2020 I was CC'd into a bunch of threads that were redistributing the...

I've written a bunch about COVID-19 contact tracing apps recently as they relate to security and privacy, albeit in the form of long tweets. I'm going to avoid delving into the details here because they're covered more comprehensively in the resources I want to consolidate below, firstly the original thread from a fortnight ago as news of an impending app in Australia was breaking: Ok folks, let's talk about the Coronavirus tracking app as news of Australia adopting Singapore's "TraceTogether" gains momentum. I'd willingly run it and I want to explain why because there's also some very valid concerns. Let's begin: — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) April 16, 2020...

How much can you trust the assertions made by an organisation regarding their security posture? I don't mean to question whether the statements are truthful or not, but rather whether they provide any actual assurance whatsoever. For example, nearly 5 years ago now I wrote about how "we take security seriously" was a ridiculous statement to make immediately after a data breach. It seems that not much has changed since then: “At Comodo we take security very seriously and it is our highest priority.” A classic opening to an all too familiar announcement. Not a good day for any #CyberSecurity company.@comododesktop @troyhunt #InfoSec #DataBreach pic.twitter.com/JxGzS9evtT — Nigel Cox (@Harlekwin_UK) October 2, 2019 “We take 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...