Troy Hunt

I was wondering recently after poring through yet another data breach how many people actually use multi-step verification. I mean here we have a construct where even if the attacker has the victim's credentials, they're rendered useless once challenged for the authenticator code or SMS which is subsequently set. I went out looking for figures and found the following on Dropbox: > "less than 1% of the Dropbox user base is taking advantage of the company’s two-factor authentication feature": htt...

Really quick intro as I rush between events today: I'm in Melbourne and have just finished a "Hack Yourself First" workshop then it's OWASP conference time tomorrow. It's been a mostly fun week with a couple of oddball experiences thrown in, but leave you to watch the video or listen to the podcast to enjoy those :) iTunes podcast [https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/troy-hunts-weekly-update-podcast/id1176454699] | Google Play Music podcast [https://goo.gl/app/playmusic?ibi=com.google.PlayMusi...

I have no idea who it was that first modified Maslow's hierarchy of needs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs] in this fashion, but I do know that's it's never been truer than now: More wifi things used by more people in more corners of the house. Many people do now consider connectivity to be a pretty essential need in their life yet as our wifi demands have increased, many people are still attempting to make do with the networking gear of yesteryear. I was one of th...

Yep, hit right in the face with a dodgeball. There was blood. But retribution was swiftly mine as I hunted down the kids on the other team. Oh - and I also loaded 711 million records into HIBP. That's the real story this week and I wanted to speak in depth about everything from where the data came from to why you can't get your password out of it to frankly, some of the kinda disappointing comments some people left. This is a very multifaceted issue and I hope I do it justice in the audio here....

Last week I was contacted by someone alerting me to the presence of a spam list. A big one. That's a bit of a relative term though because whilst I've loaded "big" spam lists into Have I been pwned (HIBP) before [https://www.troyhunt.com/have-i-been-pwned-and-spam-lists-of-personal-information/], the largest to date has been a mere 393m records and belonged to River City Media [https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#RiverCityMedia]. The one I'm writing about today is 711m records which makes i...

I'm at the snow! Yes, Australia has snow. No, it's not like the big mountain riding of Europe or North America, but the warmer weather means you can regularly sit outside in the sun during the day with a cold beer which is pretty awesome. I've got a couple of Security Sense columns to talk about this week which I hope will get people pondering this whole security thing a bit more. Also, as you may have noticed, I've pushed this out a day early. Friday will be a half-and-a-bit day on the snow be...

I've been in Sydney all week for the NDC conference here so it's been a pretty non-stop time. A 2 day workshop, 2 new Pluralsight courses, 2 talks and all the usual social things that go along with these. But regardless, I got that Ubiquiti UniFi course out and a blog post to go along with it. I'm keeping things brief here now as I prepare for (the always epicly fun) Pubcon [https://pubconf.io/], more next week from snowy Australia. Yes - snow! iTunes podcast [https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcas...

Last year, I got fed up with my wifi [https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-finally-fixed-my-dodgy-wifi/]. The coverage was patchy, the devices were unstable (my speed would regularly drop to less than 2Mbps until I restarted the router) and even though it was new gear, it felt just like the gear I'd had a decade ago. Same basic principle of an all-in-one device, same basic web interface and almost certainly, the same update cycle - I wasn't going to be seeing firmware updates o...

Last update before travelling again, but fortunately it's just a cruisy 9-hour drive down to Sydney for NDC then a week of snowboarding (yeah Australia has snow). I'll be doing a workshop at NDC and I'll also be doing one in Melbourne next month so check that out if you're around that way. This week, an SEO bloke wearing pyjamas talked about how HTTPS was unnecessary, attempted to silence any naysayers and then eventually recanted and deleted his original views. It's odd, because they were the...

As best I understand it, one of the most effective SEO things you can do is to repeat all the important words on your site down the bottom of the page. To save it from looking weird, you make the text the same colour as the background so people can't actually see it, but the search engines pick it up. Job done, profit! I think this is the way we did it in 1999. I don't know, I can't recall exactly, but I know I don't know and I'll happily admit to being consciously incompetent in the ways of SE...