Security

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...

Just a tad over 5 years ago, I released my first ever Pluralsight course - OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks for ASP.NET [https://pluralsight.pxf.io/c/1196446/424552/7490?u=https%3A%2F%2Fapp.pluralsight.com%2Flibrary%2Fcourses%2Fowasp-top10-aspdotnet-application-security-risks%2Ftable-of-contents] . 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...

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 wer...

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 [https://www.aaron-powell.com/] who spends his life writing JS things. We spoke about manag...

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 Th...

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 ridi...

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 ~...