Speaking

I’ve been doing a lot of talking about API security recently because frankly, there’s a lot to talk about. Those little web services that sit behind the rich client apps on our devices and increasingly behind our Internet of Things have a nasty habit of having some really serious vulnerabilities in them. I’m talking about everything from leaking data to allowing unauthorised users to perform actions they shouldn’t be allowed to all the way through to entirely useless SSL implementations because...

A couple of weeks back, this bloke hit the news [http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/barry-spurr-emails-investigated-by-university-of-sydney-20141016-1179kj.html] when his private emails were leaked and disclosed that he was fond of, shall we say, a very “colonial” vernacular when it comes to talking about our indigenous people: That he is (was?) a professor at a university would normally suggest that he’s a pretty switched on guy, but the evidence is clearly to the contrary. Speaking of people we’d...

You know how you always wanted a fork with an ARM processor that could upload data wirelessly over the internet? C’mon, you know you want it and now you can get a HAPIfork [http://www.hapi.com/product/hapifork]. Or how about your light globes? Yes, LIFX totally rocks [http://au.lifx.co/] but no, I wasn’t so keen on the idea once I learned your neighbours could pwn your wifi through them [http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/security-vulnerability-found-in-lifx-smart-light-bulbs-...

I’ve learned some rather intriguing things about what our mobile apps are doing while we’re not looking in the six days since I launched the challenge to find crazy stuff in mobile app communications [https://www.troyhunt.com/2014/10/find-crazy-stuff-in-mobile-app.html]. For example, there’s the social app that allows you to accept friend requests on behalf of someone else [https://www.troyhunt.com/2014/10/find-crazy-stuff-in-mobile-app.html#comment-1627770487] if you call the API in the right...

Here’s a scary stat for you: last year was the most hacked year ever. According to Risk Based Security [https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/reports/2013-DataBreachQuickView.pdf], we saw 823M records exposed via data breaches: Nasty stuff right? Yeah, but it gets worse. As of mid 2014, we’re already looking at 502 million records exposed [http://datalossdb.org/incident_highlights/66-hacking-exposed-78-of-all-records-compromised-in-first-half-of-2014] . Bugger. These breaches keep on coming and w...

Did I mention that we have some terrible security flaws with our APIs behind rich client apps? Pretty sure I did’; oh and I did just write a Pluralsight course that shot to the top of the charts [http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses/TableOfContents/hack-your-api-first] so yeah, there’s that! There are a few reasons why vulnerabilities in APIs are the new black: 1. They’re that much less obvious than vulnerabilities in browser-based apps; you don’t see the URL, you don’t get browser war...

I know I’ve shared this a number of times now, but no matter how much I see it, it still cracks me up: [https://www.troyhunt.com/2012/07/lessons-in-website-security-anti.html] Make sense? Of course it doesn’t and therein lies the insanity of it all! But let us not single out Tesco alone, there are plenty of British companies that construct responses like this (sorry English people, I don’t know why, they just seem to feature disproportionately to the rest of the world). In fact earlier this w...

How did you get started in this industry? I mean what made you go “Hey, sitting it a keyboard day in day out whilst focussed on screens and not seeing much sunlight sounds awesom…” – wait, it doesn’t sound quite so awesome when you think of it like that. In fact that was my original view of computers in general but as I told Shawn Wildermuth on his latest Hello World podcast [http://wildermuth.com/hwpod/36_Troy_Hunt], that view of the world soon changed. The change of heart was more than helped...

We’ve become accustomed to the whole idea of us being electronically tracked based on our various personal habits. In fact just the other day I was asking online about Bose headphones, did a couple of searches then next thing I knew, my own blog was plugging them to me: But again, we’ve got a bit of a sense of tracking cookies now and that the same ad networks operate across seemingly independent websites therefore providing the ability to track and target information. Ratchet up the tracki...

A couple of Saturdays back I spent a day down in Melbourne at DDD [http://www.dddmelbourne.com/] doing the usual combination of showing people some of the ridiculous stuff we’re doing on the net in relation to privacy, how we as developers are building some woefully insecure apps and generally making everyone depressed about the state of web. I do mean that in a constructive way though and indeed that’s the entire premise behind the Hack Yourself First courses I’ve been writing [http://pluralsig...