Security

It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point", that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass and as I said at the time, "will very shortly become the norm". Since that time, the percentage of web pages loaded over a secure connection has rocketed from 52% to 71% whilst the proportion of the world's top 1 million websites redirecting people to HTTPS has gone from 20% to about half (projected). The rapid adoption has been driven by a combination of ever more visible browser warnings (it was Chrome and Firefox's changes which prompted the aforementioned tipping point post), more easily accessible certificates via both Let's Encrypt and...

Try publishing something to the internet - anything - and see how it long it takes before something nasty is probing away at it. Brand new website, new domain and it's mere hours (if not minutes) before requests for wp-admin are in the logs. Yes, I know it's not a Wordpress site but that doesn't matter, the bots don't care. But that's just indiscriminate scanning, nothing personal; how about deliberate and concerted attacks more specifically designed to get into your things? As the value of what you have increases, so do the attacks and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. There's a lot you can do in terms of defences, but nothing you can do to stop randoms...

Just a tad over 5 years ago, I released my first ever Pluralsight course - OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks for ASP.NET. More than 32k people have listened to more than 78k hours of content in this course making it not just the most popular course I've ever released, but also keeping it as my most popular in the library even today by a long way. Developers have a huge appetite for OWASP content and I'm very happy to now give them even more Top 10 goodness in the course I'm announcing here - Play by Play: OWASP Top 10 2017. This time, I've teamed up with Andrew van der Stock who was an integral part of...

Remember when web security was all about looking for padlocks? I mean in terms of the advice we gave your everyday people, that's what it boiled down to - "look for the padlock before entering passwords or credit card info into a website". Back in the day, this was pretty solid advice too as it gave you confidence not just in the usual confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of the web traffic, but in the legitimacy of the site as well. If it had a padlock, you could trust it and there's weren't a lot of exceptions to that. But as time has gone by and HTTPS has become increasingly ubiquitous and obtainable by all, the veracity of that...

Ah JavaScript, the answer to - and cause of - all our problems on the web today! Just kidding, jQuery has solved all our JS problems now... But seriously, JS is a major component of so much of what we build online these days and as with our other online things, the security posture of it is enormously important to understand. Recently, I teamed up with good mate and fellow Pluralsight author Aaron Powell who spends his life writing JS things. We spoke about managing auth tokens, identity persistence across sessions, service workers, CORS, third party libraries (and their vulnerabilities), client side validation considerations, anti-forgery tokens and much, much more. This is a 1 hour and 13 minute "Play...

The more time that goes by and the more deeply I give it thought, the more convinced I am that the web is held together with sticky tape. No - cyber-sticky tape! Because especially when it comes to security, there are fundamental and inherent shortcomings in everything from HTTP to HTML and many of the other acronyms that make the web work as it does today. We've been trying to get this right for 25 years as of yesterday too: Today: The 25th anniversary of the web: https://t.co/57NuBcpuqt Thanks CERN and Sir Tim Berners-Lee! #madeineurope— Mikko Hypponen (@mikko) April 30, 2018 Cross site request forgery is a perfect example; here we have a situation where the...

Remember the anti-piracy campaign from years back about "You Wouldn't Steal a Car"? This was the rather sensationalist piece put together by the Motion Picture Association of America in an attempt to draw parallels between digital piracy and what they viewed as IRL ("In Real Life") equivalents. Here's a quick recap: The very premise that the young girl sitting in her bedroom in the opening scene is in any way relatable to the guy in the dark alley sliding a slim jim down the Merc's door is ridiculous. As expected, the internet responded with much hilarity because no-way, no-how are any of the analogies in that video even remotely equivalent to digital piracy: And even if...

I saw a story pop up this week which made a bunch of headlines and upon sharing it, also sparked some vigorous debate. It all had to do with a 19-year-old bloke in Canada downloading some publicly accessible documents which, as it later turned out, shouldn't have been publicly accessible. Let's start with this video as it pretty succinctly explains the issue in consumer-friendly terms: VIDEO: Nova Scotia's government is accusing a 19-year-old of breaching their government website's security ~ Privacy experts disagree. Oh, and here's how the teen did it: pic.twitter.com/FQ2qXJoP89— Brett Ruskin (@Brett_CBC) April 13, 2018 So the crux of the matter seems to be that the guy...

Recently, I've witnessed a couple of incidents which have caused me to question some pretty fundamental security basics with our local Aussie telcos, specifically Telstra and Optus. It began with a visit to the local Telstra store earlier this month to upgrade a couple of phone plans which resulted in me sitting alone by this screen whilst the Telstra staffer disappeared into the back room for a few minutes: Is it normal for @Telstra to display customer passwords on publicly facing terminals in their stores? (You know, the same password people give their bank.) This is the user-selected password used for identity verification with store customers wandering past it. pic.twitter.com/KiaGNKhaig— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 1, 2018...

Here's the tl;dr - someone named "Md. Shofiur R" found troyhunt.com on a "free online malware scanner" and tried to scare me into believing my site had security vulnerabilities then shake me down for a penetration test. It didn't work out so well for him, here's the blow-by-blow account of things then I'll add some more thoughts afterwards: Should I respond? 😂 pic.twitter.com/lifCZRcICF— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 20, 2018 I couldn’t help myself pic.twitter.com/zvx3myyItn— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 20, 2018 Ooh, he’s good! Suggestions? This feels like it’ll be more fun crowd-sourced 😎 pic.twitter.com/i2EFDFgLem— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 20, 2018 Your...