This morning I was reading a piece on the Ashley Madison hack [http://www.inquisitr.com/2281408/ashley-madison-hack-customer-service-impact-team-complaints-was-he-on-ashley-madison-site-down-as-users-turn-to-private-investigators/] which helped cement a few things in my mind. The first thing is that if this data ends up being made public (and it’s still an “if”) then it will rapidly be shared far and wide. Of course this happens with many major data breaches, but the emergence already of domain...

I’m very happy to be heading back to the US in a couple of months, this time to keynote at OWASP’s AppSecUSA in San Fransisco [https://2015.appsecusa.org/]. I had a great time in Amsterdam only a couple of months ago keynoting at AppSecEU as well [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/02/app-sec-in-europe.html] and the whole event was just a heap of fun. It was a really good mix of security pros and developers, each bringing their own strengths to the show and making for some really interesting talks...

If I’m honest, the success of Have I been pwned? (HIBP) [https://haveibeenpwned.com] took me by surprise. It started out as an intriguing exercise to look at how the same accounts were being compromised across multiple data breaches and morphed into something well beyond that in pretty short order. The unexpected success of the service made for some really intriguing technology challenges and provided me with an excellent opportunity to push Microsoft’s Azure to the limits, not just in terms of...

I always find data breaches like today’s Ashley Madison one [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/online-cheating-site-ashleymadison-hacked/] curious in terms of how people react. But this one is particularly curious because of the promise of “discreet” encounters: Of course when the modus operandi of the site is to facilitate extramarital affairs then “discreet” is somewhat of a virtue… if they actually were discreet about their customers’ identities! This all made me think back to the Adult...

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed a rather major job change on my behalf [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/05/so-dust-has-finally-settled.html] recently. The day to day office grind has gone and corporate life is now well and truly behind me, where it will firmly stay. One of the things that amazed me most when I finally wrote about this is how surprised so many people were that I actually had a normal day job: > Can't believe @troyhunt [https://twitter.com/troyhunt] had another jo...

So this has been getting quite a bit of airtime today: > @Sacro [https://twitter.com/Sacro] Hi Ben, I understand but as a business we've chosen not to have the compatibility with password managers. Thanks, Joe — British Gas Help (@BritishGasHelp) July 14, 2015 [https://twitter.com/BritishGasHelp/status/620956147680432128] Yes, it’s ridiculous and British Gas are getting the lambasting they so deserve, but egregious security faux pas is hardly a new thing for them: > @passy [https://twitter....

This is really not what you ever want to see on your own site: It’s a JavaScript prompt and no, it’s not meant to be there. Someone had successfully mounted an XSS attack against this very website! Now I’ve written a lot about XSS, I’ve authored multiple Pluralsight courses that talk about it in detail and I’ve run many workshops on the topic teaching others the very mechanics of how cross site scripting works. Yet here we are – XSS on my own blog. Fortunately, this was discovered by frien...

Over the last week, the Hacking Team story has absolutely exploded. It’s dominated the security news, featured heavily in tech publications and regularly appeared in the mainstream press. The 400GB of data leaked has been extensively torrented, mirrored and reproduced then of course commentated on at length in various articles and social media pieces. In terms of public breaches, this is as exposed as data gets. Clearly, this incident is also highly controversial. Hacking Team has long been und...

Recent I wrote about Speaker style bingo [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/06/speaker-style-bingo-10-presentation.html] which called out a bunch of common anti-patterns I see (and indeed have done myself) in technical talks. If I’m honest, I’m a bit surprised at how much attention that post garnered and it appears to have really resonated with people. When I wrote that post, I was back home but between speaking events in Europe so was both reflecting on the talks I’d just done and preparing for the...

I hate getting notices like this one from a few hours ago: I’ve had many of these already over the years and I’m sure I’ll see many more in the years to come, that’s just how the web seems to work these days. But here’s what really got my attention in Plex’s email today: > We're sorry for the inconvenience, but both your privacy and security are very important to us Oh good, feeling much better now! So privacy and security are important, but with the benefit of hindsight, probably not imp...