Security

You know what really surprised me about this whole WannaCry ransomware problem [https://www.troyhunt.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-wannacrypt-ransomware/]? No, not how quickly it spread. Not the breadth of organisations it took offline either and no, not even that so many of them hadn't applied a critical patch that landed a couple of months earlier. It was the reactions to this tweet that really surprised me: > Why is malware effective? Because of idiotic advice like this: "Stop Wi...

I woke up to a flood of news about ransomware today. By virtue of being down here in Australia, a lot happens in business hours around the world while we're sleeping but conversely, that's given me some time to collate information whilst everyone else is taking a break. The WannaCry incident is both new and scary in some ways and more of the same old stuff in others. Here's what I know and what the masses out there need to understand about this and indeed about ransomware in general. The ransom...

The short version: I'm loading over 1 billion breached accounts into HIBP. These are from 2 different "combo lists", collections of email addresses and passwords from all sorts of different locations. I've verified their accuracy (including my own record in one of them) and many hundreds of millions of the email addresses are not already in HIBP. Because of the nature of the data coming from different places, if you're in there then treat it as a reminder that your data is out there circulating...

My mate Lars Klint shared this tweet the other day: > Your password is not unique. pic.twitter.com/ga4GwxtzrQ [https://t.co/ga4GwxtzrQ] — Lars Klint (@larsklint) April 16, 2017 [https://twitter.com/larsklint/status/853507749488975873] Naturally, I passed it on [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/853517036131041280] because let's face it, that's some crazy shit going on right there. To which the Twitters responded with equal parts abject horror and berating comments for not having already iden...

Well, good one Australia, UK and whoever else has embarked on this hare-brained scheme, you've just made things a whole lot worse. Our respective governments (in all their ivory-towered wisdom), have decided that because one of us could one day decide to become a terrorist, they'd better keep a big whack of our internet browsing history just in case. The theory these genius policy makers have is that if they can probe into all our lives far enough, they'll be able to see when we're doing terrori...

It's a great time for HTTPS. Actually, there's never been a better time and as each day goes by, we see constant reminders of how important it is. Someone sent me a great example of this just the other day by virtue of a bug that had been lodged with Mozilla [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1348902]: > Your notice of insecure password and/or log-in automatically appearing on the log-in for my website, Oil and Gas International is not wanted and was put there without our permission....

Someone sent me an email today which essentially boiled down to this: > Hey, Microsoft's Azure Active Directory alerted me to leaked credentials but won't give me any details so there's very little I can do about it This is a really interesting scenario and it relates to the way Microsoft reports risk events [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-reporting-risk-events#leaked-credentials] , one of which is the discovery of leaked credentials that match those...

The tech news recently has seen quite a lot of chatter about an alleged haul of Apple credentials [http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-icloud-ransom-what-you-need-to-know/], apparently about 250 million of them in all. Allegedly. Maybe. Or was it 300 million? [https://www.macrumors.com/2017/03/22/apple-ransom-300m-icloud-accounts-claim/]. No - wait - it might have only been 200 million [http://mashable.com/2017/03/21/hackers-icloud-accounts-ransom/#VyYFdlgLMkqN]. The number itself has been the so...

I went to Helsinki a couple of years ago. I was there running a security workshop for a local company and whilst in town, I caught up with Mikko Hypponen [https://twitter.com/mikko]: > Troy Hunt (@troyhunt [https://twitter.com/troyhunt]) in Helsinki today. Troy's http://t.co/zOiZnkMpNo service is highly recommended! Use it. pic.twitter.com/lf59Hz7zvI [http://t.co/lf59Hz7zvI] — Mikko Hypponen (@mikko) May 28, 2015 [https://twitter.com/mikko/status/603890257814278144] Now Mikko is a very inter...

LastPass had an issue the other day [https://blog.lastpass.com/2017/03/security-update-for-the-lastpass-extension.html/] , a rather nasty one by all accounts that under certain (undisclosed) circumstances, it looks like it could lead to someone's password (or possibly passwords) being disclosed by virtue of a remote code execution vulnerability. This is not a good thing - nobody wants an RCE vuln in their software - but as is prone to happen with these incidents, some people went about promptly...