Hey, I really hate to tell you this, but we were hacked and your account containing a bunch of really sensitive personal data was exposed. I know, it’s enormously inconvenient but I have good news for you – your credit card is fine! Now yes, banks do have very good fraud protection these days and they would almost certainly have reversed any illegitimate charges, but isn’t this great news! Oh yeah – they’ll also issue you a new card too and don’t worry, that won’t cost you a cent. Yes, you’ll n...

I’ve been doing this fantastic demo about browser security headers in a lot of my recent talks and workshops. It’s always a lot of fun and it’s very interactive – you can try this out for yourself right now – and it works like this: So cross site scripting (XSS) is still a big thing. Yes it’s been around for ages and yes we should be on top of it by now, but here we are. Anyway, I was at the AppSecEU conference in the Netherlands a few months ago and a local guy called Breno de Winter did a fan...

I’ve always written very publicly about how Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) was conceived, built and indeed how it performs. If ever there was a time to look back at that performance, it’s in the wake of the first few days after loading in the Ashley Madison breach. I want to share the “warts and all account” of what I observed over the three days of utter chaos that ensued. I first learned of the incident at about 6am local on Wednesday which was very shortly after the t...

I found myself in somewhat of a unique position last week: I’d made the Ashley Madison data searchable for verified subscribers of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and now – perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect – I was being inundated with email. I mean hundreds of emails every day with people asking questions about the data. Not just asking questions, but often giving me their life stories as well. These stories shed a very interesting light on the incident, one that mos...

To date, I’ve avoided commenting on the other Ashley Madison search services and have invested my efforts purely in keeping Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) ticking along. I’ve seen them come and indeed I’ve seen some of them go too. I’ve seen many that enable you to get confirmation about the presence of an email in Ashley Madison, others that return everything about the user. Publicly. To anyone. But something I saw today struck a very different chord with me, something...

This was always going to be a huge incident given not just the scale of the number of accounts impacted by the Ashley Madison breach [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/was-the-ashley-madison-database-leaked/] (well over 30M), but the sensitivity of the data within it. However the interest has surprised even me – I loaded the breached data into Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) about 8 hours ago and I’m presently seeing about 30k visitors an hour to the site. I’ve had a c...

I run a workshop which I often do privately for organisations or as a part of various conferences which I title “Hack Yourself First”. I wrote about what I do in these recently in relation to my upcoming US workshops next month [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/07/its-app-sec-in-usa-and-hack-yourself.html] and the ones I’ll be doing in London in Jan [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/07/its-time-to-visit-london.html] but in short, it’s a couple of days of very hands-on exercises where we look at a heap...

I’ve often received feedback from people about this SSL Labs test of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP): Just recently I had an email effectively saying “drop this cipher, do that other thing, you’re insecure kthanksbye”. Precisely what this individual thought an attacker was going to do with an entirely public site wasn’t quite clear (and I will come back to this later on), but regardless, if I’m going to have SSL then clearly I want good SSL and this report bugged me....

I see literally millions of compromised records from online systems every week courtesy of maintaining Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP), in fact I’ve seen well over 200M of them since starting the service just under two years ago. I’ve gotten used to seeing both seriously sensitive personal data (the Adult Friend Finder breach [http://fortune.com/2015/05/22/adultfriendfinder-hackers/] is a good example of that) as well as “copycat” breaches (the same data dumped under diff...

I regularly share files with people that I want them to grab over HTTP from a location without any auth or other hurdles. They’re not sensitive files, they’re things like exercises I might be running in workshops which I want people to download from a common location. I normally put them in Dropbox, “Share Dropbox Link” then shorten it with my custom troy.hn short URL so they can read it from the screen in a meeting room and point them there. In fact this is exactly what I did last week – just a...