Security

That's it - I'm calling it - extended validation certificates are dead. Sure, you can still buy them (and there are companies out there that would just love to sell them to you!), but their usefulness has now descended from "barely there" to "as good as non-existent". This change has come via a combination of factors including increasing use of mobile devices, removal of the EV visual indicator by browser vendors and as of today, removal from Safari on iOS (it'll also be gone in Mac OS Mojave w...

This is going to be a brief blog post but it's a necessary one because I can't load the data I'm about to publish into Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com] (HIBP) without providing more context than what I can in a single short breach description. Here's the story: Kayo.moe [https://kayo.moe/] is a free, public, anonymous hosting service. The operator of the service (Kayo) reached out to me earlier this week and advised they'd noticed a collection of files uploaded to the site which a...

Here's how it normally plays out: It all begins when a company pops up online and makes some sort of ludicrous statement related to their security posture, often as part of a discussion on a public social media platform such as Twitter. Shortly thereafter, the masses descend on said organisation and express their outrage at the stated position. Where it gets interesting (and this is the whole point of the post), is when another group of folks pop up and accuse the outraged group of doing a bit o...

Rounding out a recent spate of new Pluralsight courses is one final one: Modern Browser Security Reports [https://pluralsight.pxf.io/c/1196446/424552/7490?u=https%3A%2F%2Fapp.pluralsight.com%2Flibrary%2Fcourses%2Fmodern-browser-security-reports] . This time, it's with Scott Helme [https://scotthelme.co.uk/] who for most of my followers, needs no introduction. You may remember Scott from such previous projects as securityheaders.io [https://securityheaders.com/], Report URI [https://report-uri.co...

Only a few weeks ago, I wrote about a new GDPR course with John Elliott [https://www.troyhunt.com/new-pluralsight-course-the-state-of-gdpr-common-questions-and-misperceptions/] . We've been getting fantastic feedback on that course and I love the way John has been able to explain GDPR in a way that's actually practical and makes sense! In my experience, that's a bit of a rare talent in GDPR land... When we recorded that course in London a couple of months back, we also recorded another one on D...

Earlier this year, I spent some time in San Fran with friend and Bugcrowd [https://www.bugcrowd.com/] founder Casey Ellis [https://twitter.com/caseyjohnellis] where we recorded a Pluralsight "Play by Play" titled Bug Bounties for Companies [https://www.troyhunt.com/new-pluralsight-course-bug-bounties-for-companies/]. I wrote about that in the aforementioned post which went out in May and I mentioned back then that we'd also created a second course targeted directly at researchers. We had to pull...

So that little project Scott Helme [https://scotthelme.co.uk/] and I took on - WhyNoHTTPS.com [https://whynohttps.com/] - seems to have garnered quite a bit of attention. We had about 81k visitors drop by on the first day and for the most part, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Most people have said it's great to have the data surfaced publicly and they've used that list to put some pressure on sites to up their game. We're already seeing some sites on the Day 1 list go HTTPS (alth...

As of today, Google begins shipping Chrome 68 which flags all sites served over the HTTP scheme as being "not secure" [https://security.googleblog.com/2018/02/a-secure-web-is-here-to-stay.html]. This is because the connection is, well, not secure so it seems like a fairly reasonable thing to say! We've known this has been coming for a long time now both through observing the changes in the industry and Google specifically saying "this is coming". Yet somehow, we've arrived at today with a sizabl...

It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point" [https://www.troyhunt.com/https-adoption-has-reached-the-tipping-point/], that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point] 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% [https://letsencrypt.org/stats/] whilst the proportion of the world's t...

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 wha...