Troy Hunt

When is data "public"? And what does "public" even mean? Does it mean it's merely visible to the public? Or does it mean the public can do anything they like with it? This discussion comes up time and time again as it did with the huge leak of PDL data only last month [https://www.troyhunt.com/data-enrichment-people-data-labs-and-another-622m-email-addresses/] . For the most part, the impacted data in this incident came from LinkedIn, a service where by design we (including myself) publish perso...

Monday: 40C and lapping up the Gold Coast sunshine. Wednesday: -8C and lapping up... Juicy IPA [https://www.klokkco.no/en/beers/juicy-ipa/]! I'm back in Oslo and catching up with the locals including running a roundtable discussion for CSOs at Microsoft, visiting the Norwegian National Cyber Security Centre ( recently onboarded to HIBP [https://www.troyhunt.com/welcoming-the-norwegian-government-to-hibp/]) and chatting with Forbrukerrådet, the Norwegian Consumer Counsel. Plus, there's an all new...

Back in July last year, Scott Helme and I shipped a little pet project that tracked the world's largest websites not implementing HTTPS by default [https://www.troyhunt.com/why-no-https-heres-the-worlds-largest-websites-not-redirecting-insecure-requests/] . We called it Why No HTTPS? [https://whynohttps.com/] and it gave people a way to see the largest websites not taking transport layer security seriously. We also broke the list down on a country-by-country basis and it quickly became a means o...

I recorded this right before heading out for my final conference talk of the year at YOW! Melbourne where I was due to do the closing keynote of the event. That's now done, questions answered and beers drunk and I left the event feeling great. One of the things I get the most pleasure out of at conferences is hanging around talking to people so a big thanks to everyone who made the time today to stay back on a Friday evening and cap a very busy year of conferences off in this fashion. I'm going...

Last month, Disney launched their new streaming service Disney+ [https://www.disneyplus.com/]; "The best stories in the world, all in one place", apparently. The service was obviously rather popular because within days the tech (and mainstream) headlines were proclaiming that thousands of hacked Disney+ accounts were already for sale on hacking forums [https://www.zdnet.com/article/thousands-of-hacked-disney-accounts-are-already-for-sale-on-hacking-forums/] . This is becoming an alarmingly regul...

I'm presently on the YOW! conference tour which means doing the same keynote three times over in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. It's my first time back at YOW! since 2015 and it's always a nice way to wrap up the year, especially the Brisbane leg I'm on at the moment in my home state. That's kept me busy, but it's some tweets last week that have kept me entertained so I'm talking about those as well as some reflections on what is now 6 years of running HIBP. Next update I'll try and push out a...

It's summer! Yes, I know it's back to front for many of you but Dec 1 means it's sunnier than ever here. Regardless, this week I've been at DDD in Brisbane, written my 10 year old son Ari and I running kids coding clubs in Oslo (cold) and London (rainy) next month and the Swiss gov being on-boarded onto HIBP. Plus there's this week's sponsor IVPN and how tracking ain't tracking (that may be a bit of an old Aussieism [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7TUiMCeils]). Next week I'll come to you from...

I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days in Switzerland, firstly in Geneva visiting (and speaking at [https://webcast.web.cern.ch/event/683/camera-slides]) CERN followed by a visit to the nation's capital, Bern. There I spent some time with a delegation of the National Cybersecurity Centre discussing the challenges they face and where HIBP can play a role. Continuing the march forward to provide governments with better access to their departments' data exposed in breaches [https://www....

When I first started writing code a few decades ago, it was a rather bland affair involving a basic text editor and physical books for reference. I didn't have an opportunity to create anything usable by others until years later and perhaps most importantly in the context of this blog post, I didn't have anyone in my family able to teach me about coding. For many kids today, that last point is still just as relevant as it was in the 80's and 90's with one major caveat - it doesn't have to be. Te...

Kangaroos! I've been trying to line these guys up for weeks to no avail but finally, they've delivered. Speaking of delivering, I actually got 3 blog posts out this week which I've not done for a while, the most significant of which relates to "data enrichment" companies (also often referred to as "data aggregators"). I have a fundamental issue with the very premise of how these firms operate and I'm getting a little sick of finding my own data in there. Have a listen and see what you think, but...