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Weekly Update 121

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...

No, Spotify Wasn't Hacked

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...

Weekly Update 120

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...

2018 Retrospective

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...

10 Personal Finance Lessons for Technology Professionals

> Patience. Frugality. Sacrifice. When you boil it down, what do those three things have in common? Those are choices. Money is not peace of mind. Money’s not happiness. Money is, at its essence, that measure of a man’s choices. This is part of the opening monologue of the Ozark series [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEK9HrQ9E4I] and when I first heard it, I immediately stopped the show and dropped it into this blog post. It's a post that has been many years coming, one I started drafting about...

Weekly Update 119

I'm home! And it's a nice hot Christmas! And I've got a new car! And that's where the discussion kinda started heading south this week. As I say in the video, the reaction to my tweet about it was actually overwhelmingly positive, but there was this unhealthy undercurrent of negativity which was really disappointing to see. Several other non-related events following that demonstrated similar online aggressiveness and I don't know if it was a case of too much eggnog or simply people having more d...

Weekly Update 118

And that's it for Canada. I recorded this Saturday morning local before heading out for last runs with the family. It's been fun but as I just tweeted sitting here in the airport: > That’s it for Canada! It’s been fun, but it’s time for sunshine again ?? ✈️ ?? pic.twitter.com/Pbxy83MlHo [https://t.co/Pbxy83MlHo] — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) December 23, 2018 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1076666318814756864?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] This week I'm talking about my new (free!) Pluralsight course,...

Weekly Update 117

I'm in Whistler! And as I say at the start of this video, I did seriously consider having a week off these videos, but I found a comfy spot by the fire and a cold beer and all was good in the world again. This week has some updates on my Canada travels, a couple of data breaches I loaded during the week, new HIBP stickers and some really screwy password practices at HSBC. I'll still be here in Whistler next week so will pump out one more snowy update before heading home for a hot Christmas. [ht...

Weekly Update 116

I'm on countdown to take-off for the next 2 and a bit weeks so I'm going to keep this intro really short because it's sitting between me and a relaxing cold one (as soon as the bags are ready). Heaps of services got pwned, Australia has a screwy set of circumstances (and reactions) around a cyber bill and HIBP had a 5th birthday celebration which resulted in stickers and a really fun live AMA video. That's it for now - next week's update comes from the snow! [https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast...

Have I Been Pwned - The Sticker

So today is Have I Been Pwned's [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-have-i-been-pwned/] (HIBP's) 5th birthday. I started this project out of equal parts community service and curiosity and then somehow, over the last 5 years it's grown into something massive; hundreds of thousands of unique sessions a day, millions of subscribers, working with governments around the world and even fronting up to testify in Congress. I'd love to say I had the foresight to see all this coming but I didn't. Not...