I've been at the AusCERT conference [https://conference.auscert.org.au/] this week and whilst I scored a nomination for "Individual Excellence in Information Security", it wasn't meant to be this year (or the last 2 times!) but I did get a shiny certificate :) It was a great event and I really enjoyed meeting a heap of very cool people and doing a brand new talk on responsible disclosure. I'll share that once it's publicly accessible, AusCERT usually put these out to the world and I was really h...

You know what people really like? Government regulation! ...crickets... Ok, maybe not so much, but this one is actually really important. The General Data Protection Regulation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation] is an EU reg that kicks in on 25 May 2018 so we've got bang on a year to get organised. It's important within the EU because it relates to how data of their citizens and residents is handled and it's important outside the EU because the regulation can im...

Hang on - where did my week go?! WannaCry came out of the blue and accosted a big whack of my time starting first thing Saturday. And then, just as it was quietening down, I go and write about not turning off Windows Update and holy shit, did people come out of the woodwork to complain about that! Seriously, just read some of the comments there and the anger directed towards what (in my experience) is usually a pretty seamless process is palpable. More than the objections to updates themselves,...

You know what really surprised me about this whole WannaCry ransomware problem [https://www.troyhunt.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-wannacrypt-ransomware/]? No, not how quickly it spread. Not the breadth of organisations it took offline either and no, not even that so many of them hadn't applied a critical patch that landed a couple of months earlier. It was the reactions to this tweet that really surprised me: > Why is malware effective? Because of idiotic advice like this: "Stop Wi...

I woke up to a flood of news about ransomware today. By virtue of being down here in Australia, a lot happens in business hours around the world while we're sleeping but conversely, that's given me some time to collate information whilst everyone else is taking a break. The WannaCry incident is both new and scary in some ways and more of the same old stuff in others. Here's what I know and what the masses out there need to understand about this and indeed about ransomware in general. The ransom...

The big news this week has been dealing with that massive volume of data I loaded into HIBP a week ago. A combination of the mechanics of getting it loaded, the flood of feedback once I did and actually trying to prepare myself for upcoming talks has made it a bit of a crazy week. If I'm honest, I'm feeling a bit run down from it all and need to take it a bit easier before heading away in a couple of weeks' time. Be that as it may, this has been a full-on week and I've captured the highlights be...

Over the last few days, I've loaded more than 1 billion new records into Have I been pwned(HIBP) [https://www.troyhunt.com/password-reuse-credential-stuffing-and-another-1-billion-records-in-have-i-been-pwned/] . As I describe in that blog post, this data was from two very large "combo lists", that is email address and password pairs created by malicious parties in order to help them break into other accounts reusing those credentials. In all, I sent about 440k email notifications and saw hundre...

Wow, what a day! I got up at about 3:30 this morning and have been going non-stop dealing with the masses of feedback as a result of the billion-and-a-bit breached records I'm presently loading into HIBP. I talk about it in the blog post, but the "small" one of 458 million records is already loaded and as I type this, at about 17:30 Friday, the big one of almost 600M is still a long way off (probably mid-morning for me tomorrow). Anyway, between other commitments and the looong lead-time of uplo...

The short version: I'm loading over 1 billion breached accounts into HIBP. These are from 2 different "combo lists", collections of email addresses and passwords from all sorts of different locations. I've verified their accuracy (including my own record in one of them) and many hundreds of millions of the email addresses are not already in HIBP. Because of the nature of the data coming from different places, if you're in there then treat it as a reminder that your data is out there circulating...

A few years back, I added a donations page to Have I been pwned (HIBP) [https://haveibeenpwned.com/Donate]. Now as I explained at the time, I didn't particularly need them to cover my hard-cash outgoings because I run the thing on a shoestring, but as I explain on that page, it takes a massive amount of effort. If people want to fling me a coffee or some beers, that's just great and I appreciate it enormously. Problem is, it's hard to individually show that appreciation. Especially during a busy...