Troy Hunt

I'm back in Oslo! Writing this the day after recording, it feels like I couldn't be further from Dubai; the temperature starts with a minus, it's snowing and there's not a supercar in sight. Back on business, this week I'm talking about the challenge of loading breaches and managing costs. A breach load immediately takes us from a very high percentage cache hit ratio on Cloudflare to zero. Consequently, our SQL costs skyrocket as the DB scales to support the load. Approximately 28 hours after l...

A super quick intro today as I rush off to do the next very Dubai thing: drive a Lambo through the desert to go dirt bike riding before jumping in a Can-Am off-roader and then heading to the kart track for a couple of afternoon sessions. I post lots of pics to my Facebook account, and if none of that is interesting, here's this week's video on more infosec-related topics: References 1. Sponsored by: Cyberattacks are guaranteed. Is your recovery? Protect your data in the cloud. Join Rubri...

Nearly four years ago now, I set out to write a book with Charlotte and RobIt was the stories behind the stories, the things that drove me to write my most important blog posts, and then the things that happened afterwards. It's almost like a collection of meta posts, each one adding behind-the-scenes commentary that most people reading my material didn't know about at the time. It was a strange time for all of us back then. I didn't leave the country for the first time in over a decade. I bare...

Today, we're happy to welcome the 37th government to have full and free access to domain searches of their gov domains in Have I Been Pwned, Armenia. Armenia's National Computer Incident Response Team AM-CERT now joins three dozen other national counterparts in gaining visibility into how data breaches impact their national interests. As we expand the reach of governments and organisations into HIBP, we hope to give defenders better insights into the impact of data breaches on their people so t...

I wouldn't say this is a list of my favourite breaches from this year as that's a bit of a disingenuous term, but oh boy were there some memorable ones. So many of the incidents I deal with are relatively benign in terms of either the data they expose or the nature of the service, but some of them this year were absolute zingers. This week, I'm talking about the ones that really stuck out to me for one reason or another, here's the top 5: References 1. Sponsored by: 1Password Extended Ac...

I was going to write about how much I've enjoyed "tinkering" with the HIBP API, but somehow, that term doesn't really seem appropriate any more for a service of this scale. On the contrary, we're putting in huge amounts of effort to get this thing fast, stable, and sustainable. We could do the first two very easily just by throwing money at the cloud, but that makes the last one a bit hard. Besides, both Stefán and I do enjoy the challenge of optimising an increasingly large system to run on a s...

I've spent more than a decade now writing about how to make Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) fast. Really fast. Fast to the extent that sometimes, it was even too fast: The response from each search was coming back so quickly that the user wasn’t sure if it was legitimately checking subsequent addresses they entered or if there was a glitch. Over the years, the service has evolved to use emerging new techniques to not just make things fast, but make them scale more under load, increase availability an...

I have absolutely no problem at all talking about the code I've screwed up. Perhaps that's partly because after 3 decades of writing software (and doing some meaningful stuff along the way), I'm not particularly concerned about showing my weaknesses. And this week, I screwed up a bunch of stuff; database queries that weren't resilient to SQL database scale changes, partially completed breach notifications I didn't notice until it was too late to easily fix, and some queries that performed so bad...

Apparently, before a child reaches the age of 13, advertisers will have gathered more 72 million data points on them. I knew I'd seen a metric about this sometime recently, so I went looking for "7,000", which perfectly illustrates how unaware we are of the extent of data collection on all of us. I started Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) in the first place because I was surprised at where my data had turned up in breaches. 11 years and 14 billion breached records later, I'm still surprised! Jason (not...

This was a much longer than usual update, largely due to the amount of time spent discussing the Earth 2 incident. As I said in the video (many times!), the amount of attention this has garnered from both Earth 2 users and the company itself is incommensurate with the impact of the incident itself. It's a nothing-burger. Email addresses and usernames, that's it, and of course, their association with the service, which may lead to some very targeted spam or phishing attempts. It's still a breach...