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I'm doing a public "Hack Yourself First" workshop in London this June

Round 2 of European travel for me this year has just wrapped up with talks in Brussels for Techorama (which incidentally, was sensational!) followed by a private event for a multinational information services company in Barcelona doing my usual Hack Yourself First workshop [https://www.troyhunt.com/workshops/]. But it's time for the next one already so it's back to Europe again and then after catching my breath at home for a couple of week, time for some US travel for the first time this year. L...

Understanding firewalls, intrusion detection systems and honeypots with Pluralsight

This was pretty big news 18 months ago: It was what greeted Sony Pictures employees [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Entertainment_hack] when they turned up to the office and switched on their machines. Machines infected with malware was one thing - a very bad thing at that - but it got much, much worse for Sony. In all, we saw about 40GB of company data walk out the proverbial door and it included everything from employee credentials to unreleased films to somewhere in the order...

Here's how I verify data breaches

Let me start with this headline [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-passwords-idUSKCN0XV1I6]: Other headlines went on to suggest that you need to change your password right now [http://www.iflscience.com/technology/millions-passwords-hotmail-gmail-and-yahoo-have-been-stolen] if you're using the likes of Hotmail or Gmail, among others. The strong implication across the stories I've read is that these mail providers have been hacked and now there's a mega-list of stolen accounts floating...

Breach concealment is not a security strategy

I've just been reading Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen [http://www.amazon.com.au/Kingpin-Butler-master-billion-network-ebook/dp/B006FLRFQK?ie=UTF8&keywords=kingpin%20hacker&qid=1461881397&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1] which sheds some really interesting light on criminal credit card fraud in the mid 2000's. Towards the end of the book, there's a reference to a 1997 case in which the government persuades the sentencing judge to permanently seal the court transcripts for fear that disclosure would impact the targ...

100 data breaches later, Have I been pwned gets its first self-submission

I certainly didn't expect it would go this far when I built Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) a few years ago, but I've just loaded the 100th data breach into the system. This brings it to a grand total of 336,724,945 breached accounts that have been loaded in over the years, another figure I honestly didn't expect to see. But there's something a bit different about this 100th data breach - it was provided to me by the site that was breached themselves. It was self-submitte...

Disqus and the disappearing comments (which still exist)

Update (just a couple of hours later): We're fixed! By all means, read the background it you're having similar problems or jump to the bottom for the solution. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm writing this post because I've pretty much exhausted all other avenues. I'm out of ideas. I'm stumped. I'm also missing a truckload of Disqus comments that should be appearing on many of the blog posts I've just migrated. Let me explain what I've done...

It's a new blog!

It's been 434 blog posts over six and a half years. It's gone from being excited about a hundred visitors in a week to hundreds of thousands on a big day. It's taken me from a hobby to a career. In so many ways, this blog has defined who I am and what I do today but finally, it was time for a change. You're now reading an all new blog in an all new design on an all new platform. The content is the only thing that remains and I've literally rebuilt everything from the ground up over the last few...

When a nation is hacked: Understanding the ginormous Philippines data breach

Remember when OPM got breached last year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach]? There was a lot of excitement in various parts of the world (namely the US) because here we had a government department (Office of Personnel Management), and they’d just lost 21.5 million records! These records included such sensitive data as names, dates of birth and addresses and by any reasonable measure, it was serious – that’s almost 7% of the country’s population! Yet some...

Lenovo P50 and my dislike of high DPI displays (for now)

A little while back, I wrote about how Lenovo were sending me some things as part of their Insiders program [https://www.troyhunt.com/2016/02/kids-and-code-simple-programming-on.html] which meant getting to use a number of machines I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about otherwise. The Yoga 900 in that blog post, for example, is not something I would have normally considered for myself as I like a physically larger, gruntier machine yet it’s turned out to be one of the best laptops I’ve eve...

Have I been pwned, opting out, VTech and general privacy things

It’s now going on two and a half years since I launched Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and I’m continually amazed by how much has happened in that time. It started out with a “mere” 152M breached records and has now more than doubled in volume, I’ve added an API, notifications, domain searches, pastes and a heap of other things both visible to the public and behind the scenes. It’s also gone from a hobby project which I thought only a few curious technology people would v...