A race to the bottom is a market condition in which there is a surplus of a commodity relative to the demand for it. Often the term is used to describe labour conditions (workers versus jobs), and in simple supply and demand terms, once there's so much of something all vying for the attention of those consuming it, the value of it plummets. On reflecting over the last 3 and a half weeks, this is where we seem to be with credential stuffing lists today and I want to use this blog post to explain...

I'm back home! It was an amazing trip in many ways, not least of which was the time it gave both Scott and myself to reflect on workload and managing lives which can be a bit of a never-ending series of commitments. To that effect, I've been backing off Twitter a bit and as I say in this update, I very quickly remembered why after a couple of short engagements yesterday. But moving forward, it's Microsoft Ignite in Sydney next week and that should be a great event, plus I'm talking about Google'...

I'm pumping this weekly update out a little bit later, pushing it just before I get on the plane back home to Australia. I've just wrapped up a week in London with Scott doing all things NDC [https://ndc-london.com/] including a couple of days of workshops and a couple of talks each. We discuss that, and how the UK seems to have an odd infatuation with doing anything that could even remotely be deemed a health and safety risk. On a more serious note, we talk about the emotional toll of the thin...

So it's been a bit of a crazy week. I got onto the plane in Australia on Thursday evening just as Europe was waking up to the news of the 773M email address credential stuffing list I loaded into HIBP. And then the flood began; blog comments, emails, tweets - it was an absolute deluge. I spent the flight fielding the ones I could, landed in Oslo and dealt with more on the way up the mountain then frankly, got there and tuned out. Out of office on, blog comments closed and tweets ignored. This tr...

And then there was the biggest data breach to go into HIBP ever! I wrote that sentence from home just after publishing all the data, then I got on a plane... Holy cow that's a lot of emails! Hundreds upon hundreds of emails came in whilst on the way to Dubai, more than I'll ever be able to respond to. Plus, I'm actually trying to have some downtime with my son on this trip particularly over the next few days so a bunch of stuff is going to have to go unanswered or at best, delayed. Mind you, a...

Many people will land on this page after learning that their email address has appeared in a data breach I've called "Collection #1". Most of them won't have a tech background or be familiar with the concept of credential stuffing so I'm going to write this post for the masses and link out to more detailed material for those who want to go deeper. Let's start with the raw numbers because that's the headline, then I'll drill down into where it's from and what it's composed of. Collection #1 is a...

Well, it's one more sunny weekly update then snow time again so I've gone particularly beachy today. I'm also particularly breachy, talking about a massive combo list I'm presently pondering for inclusion in HIBP. These lists are frequently used for account takeover attacks against the likes of Spotify which is the subject of this week's blog post. Plus, I'm talking a bit about a bunch of Ubiquiti bits I'll be installing soon to fix the problem seen below: > Relevant to this week’s video I’m ab...

Time and time again, I get emails and DMs from people that effectively boil down to this: > Hey, that paste that just appeared in Have I Been Pwned is from Spotify, looks like they've had a data breach Many years ago, I introduced the concept of pastes to HIBP [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-paste-searches-and/] and what they essentially boil down to is monitoring Pastebin and a bunch of other services for when a trove of email addresses is dumped online. Very often, those addresses are a...

And then it was 2019. Funny how quickly it gets away from you, someone just posted on my 2018 retrospective blog post this week and asked why I didn't include my congressional testimony and if I'm honest, it took me a bit to think about why as well (it was in 2017). But we're here now so it's back to business as usual blog wise. This week is dominated by the personal finance lessons blog post. This has gotten massive traction this week and has been read by tens of thousands of people. But perha...

I started doing these retrospectives 3 years ago in my first year of independence. I reckon they're a good thing for everyone to do if not in written form then at least mentally to look back on your achievements of the year. They're a great way of reflecting on success (and indeed, on failures) and they also help explain why we all feel so damn tired by the end of the year! Here's my 2018 highlights, starting with travel: Travel "Oh yeah, I'm totally gonna travel less this year" - me every sin...