Troy Hunt

Bit of a change of scenery this week; I've gone to the other end of the house whilst invasive palm tree roots are water blasted out from beneath my office window as part of our garden renos. But hey, that's a nice place to be on a day like this ? Other than the location, it's business as usual. There's been some interesting discussion on biometric this morning, I'm appealing to developers of extensions and add-ons to whitelist themselves when a CSP is present and I'm talking about Google's U2F...

Last week I wrote a couple of different pieces on passwords, firstly about why we're going to be stuck with them for a long time yet [https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-insert-thing-here-is-not-a-password-killer/] and then secondly, about how we all bear some responsibility for making good password choices [https://www.troyhunt.com/when-accounts-are-hacked-victims-must-share-the-blame/]. A few people took some of the points I made in those posts as being contentious, although on reflection I sus...

You know what I really like? A nice, slick, clean set of violation reports from the content security policy (CSP) I run on Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP). You know what I really don't like? Logging on to Report URI [https://report-uri.com/] and being greeted with something like this: This blog post is about how add-ons and extensions in browsers cause CSP violations like the ones above and how they should be dealt with. Some brief background first as I'll be sharing this...

Wow, didn't the passwords discussions go nuts this week! Passwords suck and they must die, they're never going to die, people are using bad ones, people should be able to use bad ones, developers are at fault and my personal favourite in the "how on earth did you reach that conclusion" category, I should actually do something to educate people about passwords rather than blaming them for using bad ones. I've gotta stop laying around doing nothing with my days... But seriously, both posts on pas...

It's just another day on the internet when the news is full of headlines about accounts being hacked. Yesterday was a perfect example of that with 2 separate noteworthy stories adorning my early morning Twitter feed. The first one was about HSBC disclosing a "security incident" [https://www.zdnet.com/article/hsbc-discloses-security-incident/] which, upon closer inspection, boiled down to this: > The security incident that HSBC described in its letter seems to fit the characteristics of brute-fo...

A lot has changed in the Microsoft technology world in the last 7 years since I launched ASafaWeb in September 2011 [https://www.troyhunt.com/building-safer-web-with-asafaweb/]. Windows XP is no longer the dominant operating system (Win 7 actually caught up the month I launched ASafaWeb [http://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201001-201810] ). Internet Explorer is no longer the dominant browser (Chrome was in 3rd place back then [http://gs.statcounter.c...

These days, I get a lot of messages from people on security related things. Often it's related to data breaches or sloppy behaviour on behalf of some online service playing fast and loose with HTTPS or passwords or some other easily observable security posture. But on a fairly regular basis, I get an email from someone which effectively boils down to this: > Hey, have you seen [insert thing here]? It's totally going to kill passwords! No, it's not and to save myself from repeating the same mess...

On my first attempt at recording this, I decided the framing was crooked after a couple of minutes so I started again. On my second attempt, the PC BSOD'd after 42 mins and I thought I'd lost all the audio. I hadn't, so on the third attempt I completed the last of it. Then I waited nearly an hour for it to render before realising there was unedited material at the beginning so I had to re-render the whole thing again. This is on top of one of my screens refusing to go beyond 480p today and a wee...

I'm home! And home for another 6 weeks at that which is rather exciting if I'm honest. Travel really takes its toll in so many ways and I'm really looking forward to just having a bunch of time to code, blog and jet ski (not necessarily ordered by priority). But even without having had time to blog, there's a heap of material this week including the SIBOS conference, HIBP (apparently) being a top site that's "shaped the web", people losing their minds over sex toy privacy and EV certificates, W...

Last one before home time! But it has been an epic trip and as I say in the video, this is by far my most enjoyable trip to the US yet after probably a dozen over the last few years (that includes Hawaii, too). Given the interest after my pointing out a couple of little differences in the US compared to the rest of the world last week, after the usual tech and infosec intro this week I decided to focus a big whack of this week's video on what some of differences look like. Other than that, ther...