Security

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 [https://ndcconferences.com/] whose entire liv...

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 w...

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 di...

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 [https://www.troyhunt.com/why-no-https-heres-the-worlds-largest-websites-not-redirecting-insecure-requests/] . We called it Why No HTTPS? [https://whynohttps.com/] 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 o...

Last month, Disney launched their new streaming service Disney+ [https://www.disneyplus.com/]; "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 [https://www.zdnet.com/article/thousands-of-hacked-disney-accounts-are-already-for-sale-on-hacking-forums/] . This is becoming an alarmingly regul...

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 [https://www.troyhunt.com/do-you-really-want-bank-grade-security/], but the fact remains that people have high expectations of how banks should commu...

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 hap...

Almost one year ago now, I declared extended validation certificates dead [https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-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...

Sometimes the discussion around extended validation certificates (EV) feels a little like flogging a dead horse. In fact, it was only September that I proposed EV certificates are already dead [https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-dead/] for all sorts of good reasons that have only been reinforced since that time. Yet somehow, the discussion does seem to come up time and again as it did following this recent tweet of mine: > Always find comments like this amusing: “The...

Do you ever hear those stories from your parents along the lines of "when I was young..." and then there's a tale of how risky life was back then compared to today. You know, stuff like having to walk themselves to school without adult supervision, crazy stuff like that which we somehow seem to worry much more about today than what we did then. Never mind that far less kids go missing today than 20 years [https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/about-us/cjis/ncic/ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-...