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Troy Hunt

Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, run "Have I Been Pwned" and am a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals

Weekly Update 447

I'm home! Well, for a day, then it's off to the other side of the country (which I just flew over last night on the way back from Dublin 🤦‍♂️) for an event at the Microsoft Accelerator in Perth on Monday. Such is the path we've taken, but it does provide some awesome opportunities to meet up with folks around the world and see some really interesting stuff. Come by if you're over that way or if you're on the east coast of Aus, I'll be at NDC Melbourne only a couple of weeks later. And somewhere...

Weekly Update 446

After an unusually long day of travelling from Iceland, we've finally made it to the land of Guinness, Leprechauns, and a tax haven for tech companies. This week, there are a few more lessons from the successful phish against me the previous week, and in happier news, there is some really solid progress on the HIBP UX rebuild. We spent a bunch of time with Stefan and Ingiber (the guy rebuilding the front end) whilst in Reykjavik and now have a very clear plan mapped out to get this finished in t...

Weekly Update 445

Well, this certainly isn't what I expected to be talking about this week! But I think the fact it was someone most people didn't expect to be on the receiving end of an attack like this makes it all the more consumable. I saw a lot of "if it can happen to Troy, it can happen to anyone" sort of commentary and whilst it feels a bit of obnoxious for me to be saying it that way, I appreciate the sentiment and the awareness it drives. It sucked, but I'm going to make damn sure we get a lot of mileage...

A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List

You know when you're really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That's me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported the mailing list for this blog. I'm deliberately keeping this post very succinct to ensure the message goes out to my impacted subscribers ASAP, then I'll update the post with more details. But as a quick summary, I woke up in London thi...

Weekly Update 444

It's time to fly! 🇬🇧 🇮🇸 🇮🇪 That's two new flags (or if you're on Windows and can't see flag emojis, that's two new ISO codes) I'll be adding to my "places I've been list" as we start the journey by jetting out to London right after I publish this blog. If you're in the area, I'll be speaking at Oxford University on Wednesday at 17:00 and that's a free and open event. And since recording this morning, we have managed to confirm that I will be speaking at a community event in Reykjavik the f...

Weekly Update 443

What an awesome response to the new brand! I'm so, so happy with all the feedback, and I've gotta be honest, I was nervous about how it would be received. The only negative theme that came through at all was our use of Sticker Mule, which apparently is akin to being a Tesla owner. Political controversy aside, this has been an extremely well-received launch and I've also loved seeing the issues raised on the open source repo for the front end and Ingiber's (near instant!) addressing of each and e...

Soft-Launching and Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Rebrand

Designing the first logo for Have I Been Pwned was easy: I took a SQL injection pattern, wrote "have i been pwned?" after it and then, just to give it a touch of class, put a rectangle with rounded corners around it: Job done! I mean really, what more did I need for a pet project with a stupid name that would likely only add to the litany of failed nerdy ideas I'd had before that? And then, to compress 11 and a bit years into a single sentence: it immediately became unexpectedly popular, I adde...

Weekly Update 442

We survived the cyclone! That was a seriously weird week with lots of build-up to an event that last occurred before I was born. It'd been 50 years since a cyclone came this far south, and the media was full of alarming predictions of destruction. In the end, we maxed out at 52kts just after I recorded this video: It’s here. But 47kts max gusts isn’t too bad, nothing actually blowing over here (yet). pic.twitter.com/qFyrZdiyRW — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 7, 2025 We remained completely u...

We're Backfilling and Cleaning Stealer Logs in Have I Been Pwned

I think I've finally caught my breath after dealing with those 23 billion rows of stealer logs last week. That was a bit intense, as is usually the way after any large incident goes into HIBP. But the confusing nature of stealer logs coupled with an overtly long blog post explaining them and the conflation of which services needed a subscription versus which were easily accessible by anyone made for a very intense last 6 days. And there were the issues around source data integrity on top of ever...

Weekly Update 441

Processing data breaches (especially big ones), can be extremely laborious. And, of course, everyone commenting on them is an expert, so there's a heap of opinions out there. And so it was with the latest stealer logs, a corpus of data that took the better part of a month to process. And then I made things confusing in various ways which led to both Disqus comment and ticket hell. But hey, it's finally out and now it's back to normal breach processing for the foreseeable future 🙂 Referenc...