I have a love-hate relationship with ads, whether they be on my blog or anywhere else for that matter. I get that they're a necessity for many news outlets to keep providing the free information that we all want, but I also can't stand the way advertising has descended into the sleazy, risky, slow and all-round negative experience it so frequently is today [https://www.troyhunt.com/its-2016-already-how-are-websites-still/]. I've had ads on this blog for years and they've been provided by Develo...

Last week Google announced some changes to Chrome [https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure-web.html], specifically that come January 2017, practices like this [https://www.troyhunt.com/thank-you-waitrose-now-fix-your/] are going to start resulting is browser warnings: That's just one of many such examples I've called out in the past and frankly, I have about zero sympathy for those who are doing this in the first place so a browser warning is only right. But here's...

Edit: A day and a half after publishing this post, the source of the data was eventually identified and a statement issued. Do see the updates at the end of this post. I see a lot of data breaches. I see a lot of legit ones and I see a lot of fake ones and because of that, I always verify them [https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-how-i-verify-data-breaches/] before making any claims that an organisation has been hacked. Usually I'll verify and then in conjunction with journalists I know and trust, t...

Three weeks ago today, I wrote about implementing a rate limit on the Have I been pwned (HIBP) API [https://www.troyhunt.com/the-have-i-been-pwned-api-rate-limiting-and-commercial-use/] and the original plan was to have it begin a week from today. I want to talk more about why the rate limit was required and why I've had to bring it forward to today. As I explained in the original post, there were multiple reasons for the rate limit including high volumes of API calls impacting system performan...

Earlier today, Motherboard reported on what had been rumoured for some time, namely that Dropbox had been hacked [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-stole-over-60-million-dropbox-accounts] . Not just a little bit hacked and not in that "someone has cobbled together a list of credentials that work on Dropbox" hacked either, but proper hacked to the tune of 68 million records. Very shortly after, a supporter of Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com] (HIBP) sent over the data which o...

Let's start with a quick quiz: Take a look at haveibeenpwned.com [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and tell me where the traffic is encrypted between: You see HTTPS which is good so you know it's doing crypto things in your browser, but where's the other end of the encryption? I mean at what point is the traffic decrypted? Many people would say it's at the web server but it's not, it's upstream of there at Microsoft's appliances that sits in front of the web application PaaS offering. You...

CDNs are good. You get to put your web things all over the world and then have them served to your global audience from a location close to them. For example, because this blog is served through CloudFlare [https://www.cloudflare.com/] and about two thirds of the requests to my site come direct from their cache, you're probably downloading all the images on this page from whichever point in the map below is closest to you: But what's even better than CDNs when it comes to cost and performance...

Another day, another data breach: > Full news on the GTAGaming breach is here: https://t.co/KuNSuol442 (vBulletin again) — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) August 23, 2016 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/768195115282145280] Yesterday it was a different one: > vBulletin... "Epic Games: Information Regarding Recent Forum Compromise" https://t.co/YqQlSRbtLU — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) August 23, 2016 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/768055785448321024] A couple of weeks ago it was this one: > vBull...

I've been running my Hack Yourself First workshop [https://www.troyhunt.com/workshops/] all over the world where I talk to software developers about various security risks which they then get to exploit firsthand. It's a lot of fun and very hands on and practical which inevitably means spending time looking at real world implementations of security. After running a couple of these workshops last week, I wrote Website enumeration insanity: how our personal data is leaked [https://www.troyhunt.co...

I've just wrapped up a couple of Hack Yourself First workshops [https://www.troyhunt.com/workshops/] down closer to home in Australia and true to usual form, attendees found some absolute zinger security implementations. Previous workshops have found various vulnerabilities ranging from realestate.com.au's lack of HTTPS in their Android app [https://www.troyhunt.com/are-your-apps-giving-one-device/] (pro tip: don't 301 HTTP requests to APIs!) to the one that really made headlines earlier this ye...