In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, I wanna go fast [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qJGsSuFRIg]. When I launched Pwned Passwords V2 last week [https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/], I made it fast - real fast - and I want to talk briefly here about why that was important, how I did it and then how I've since shaved another 56% off the load time for requests that hit the origin. And a bunch of other cool perf stuff while I'm here. Why Speed Matters for Pwned...

tl;dr - a collection of nearly 3k alleged data breaches has appeared with a bunch of data already proven legitimate from previous incidents, but also tens of millions of addresses that haven't been seen in HIBP before. Those 80M records are now searchable, read on for the full story: There's an unknown numbers of data breaches floating around the web. There are data breaches we knew of but they just took years to appear publicly (Dropbox, LinkedIn), data breaches we didn't know of that also too...

Every now and then, I look at one of the videos I've just recorded and only realise then how tired I look. This was one of those weeks and it was absolutely jam-packed! There was some awesome stuff and there was some very frustrating stuff. Let me add briefly to the latter here: The joy of participating in online communities is that we have these melting pots of diverse backgrounds and ideas all coming together in the one place. A huge portion of what I've learned personally has come from very...

Last August, I launched a little feature within Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) I called Pwned Passwords [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-306-million-freely-downloadable-pwned-passwords/]. This was a list of 320 million passwords from a range of different data breaches which organisations could use to better protect their own systems. How? NIST explains [https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html]: > When processing requests to establish and change memorized secr...

I had plans this week. Monday was going to be full of coding work around Pwned Passwords V2 (and a few other HIBP things) then Texthelp [https://www.texthelp.com/en-gb/] went and got themselves pwned and there went my day writing about the ramifications of that. This is a genuinely important issue and the whole concept of the JavaScript supply chain needs much better thought. We've got the technology, it's just that most people don't know it exists! I did then later get around to posting my "da...

I'll start this post where I start many of my talks - what does a hacker look like? Or perhaps more specifically, what do people think a hacker looks like? It's probably a scary image, one that's a bit mysterious, a shady character lurking in the hidden depths of the internet. People have this image in their mind because that's what they've been conditioned to believe: These are the images that adorn the news pieces we read and we've all seen them before. Hell, we've seen literally the same g...

A couple of years back as the US presidential campaign was ramping up, the Trump camp did something stupid. I know, we're all shocked but bear with me because it's an important part of the narrative of this post. One of their developers embedded this code in the campaign's donation website: <script src="https://github.com/igorescobar/jQuery-Mask-Plugin/blob/gh-pages/js/jquery.mask.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> See the problem? This tag was in the source code over at secure.donaldjt...

I'm not entirely sure how I've gotten to the end of the week feeling completely wrung out whilst having only written the one thing, but here we are. In fairness though, I've put a heap of work into Pwned Passwords [https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords] version 2 and finally completed the data set. There's some coding work and other logistics to complete before it goes live, but the plan for now is week after next so I'm looking forward to that. This week, it's all about minimum password lengths...

I've been giving a bunch of thought to passwords lately. Here we have this absolute cornerstone of security - a paradigm that every single person with an online account understands - yet we see fundamentally different approaches to how services handle them. Some have strict complexity rules. Some have low max lengths. Some won't let you paste a password. Some force you to regularly rotate it. It's all over the place. Last year, I wrote about authentication guidance for the modern era [https://w...

I'm home! It's nice being home ? This week I start by getting a couple of things off my chest, namely some pretty wacky reactions to my suggesting that we're never going to see a coders' hippocratic oath and how I feel when media outlets say "the dark web". Plus, I've got news around running workshops in Europe with Scott Helme and me finally getting a content security policy on this blog. That last one in particular makes me very happy because it really shouldn't have been this hard, but it w...