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Weekly Update 212

It's a bit of a mega one this week running over the 1-hour mark, but there's been an awful lot happen during the last week that I reckon is of interest. There's a decidedly adult theme running across the topics not by design, but just by pure coincidence between the Grindr incident, a query I got regarding erasing one's adult website browsing history and the IoT male chastity device full of security holes and potential requiring a grinder (not Grindr!) to remove. We live in interesting times......

Welcoming the Canadian Government to Have I Been Pwned

Following in the footsteps of many other national governments before them [https://www.troyhunt.com/tag/government/], I'm very happy to welcome the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security [https://cyber.gc.ca/en/] to Have I Been Pwned. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security now has full and free access to query all Canadian federal government domains across both past and future breaches. Canada's inclusion in the service brings the total to 11 federal governments across North America, Europe and Aus...

Weekly Update 211

This week there's a lot of connected things: connected shoes, connected garage camera and connected GoPro. And then there's Scott's Grindr account. Awkward. Actually, since recording this weekly update the details of the issue have now been released [https://www.troyhunt.com/hacking-grindr-accounts-with-copy-and-paste/] so I'll talk about that in more detail next week. This week there's all the above and, on a more personal note, my relationship with Charlotte. Enjoy. [https://itunes.apple.com/...

Hacking Grindr Accounts with Copy and Paste

Sexuality, relationships and online dating are all rather personal things. They're aspects of our lives that many people choose to keep private or at the very least, share only with people of our choosing. Grindr [https://www.grindr.com/] is "The World's Largest Social Networking App for Gay, Bi, Trans, and Queer People" which for many people, makes it particularly sensitive. It's sensitive not just because by using the site it implies one's sexual orientation, but because of the sometimes sev...

Weekly Update 210

Wow, 4 years already. Regardless of where I've been in the world or the stresses that have been going on in my personal life [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1278605345154191360], every single week without exception there's been a video. This makes 210 of them now, and these days they're live from a much more professional setup in a location that has absolutely no chance of changing for the foreseeable future. Not exactly the way I saw things panning out 4 years ago, but I guess we've all be...

Weekly Update 209

More IoT, more cyber and more Q&A so yeah, business as usual this week. More specifically, a lot of this week's update talks about VPNs and where they still make sense with so much HTTPS all over the place these days. As I say in the vid, blog posts like the VPN one I did this week are often done to help me get my thoughts on a topic straight and a lot of things became a lot clearer for me in doing that. The headline figure out of that post IMHO is that only 2.3% of websites are forcing all conn...

Padlocks, Phishing and Privacy; The Value Proposition of a VPN

I want a "secure by default" internet with all the things encrypted all the time such that people can move freely between networks without ever needing to care about who manages them or what they're doing with them. I'm a massive proponent of Let's Encrypt's and Cloudflare's missions to secure the web and of browser paradigms such as HSTS [https://www.troyhunt.com/understanding-http-strict-transport/] and upgrade-insecure-requests via content security policies [https://www.troyhunt.com/the-6-st...

Weekly Update 208

The highlight of my week was absolutely getting the Shelly 1 units behind a couple of my light switches working as I'd always dreamed. It just opens up so many automation possibilities that I'm really excited about what I might do in the future with them now. When I get the place to a standard I'm happy with, I'll definitely do a good walkthrough and show how it all works. Until then, this week's update has some general infosec stuff but chief amongst that is the Giggle app situation. So many la...

Weekly Update 207

I kicked off a little bit earlier on this one in order to wrap up before the Burning Minds keynote, and it's interesting to see just how much difference that little sliver of sunlight makes to the video quality. Check the very start of the video versus the very end; this is the sunset slipping through the crack in the fully drawn blinds, make a massive difference. In other news, I'm talking about how I prepare my talks and deliver them timed down to the minute (I had 20 seconds spare on this one...

We Didn't Encrypt Your Password, We Hashed It. Here's What That Means:

You've possibly just found out you're in a data breach. The organisation involved may have contacted you and advised your password was exposed but fortunately, they encrypted it. But you should change it anyway. Huh? Isn't the whole point of encryption that it protects data when exposed to unintended parties? Ah, yes, but it wasn't encrypted it was hashed and therein lies a key difference: > Saying that passwords are “encrypted” over and over again doesn’t make it so. They’re bcrypt hashes so g...