Security

It's a great time for HTTPS. Actually, there's never been a better time and as each day goes by, we see constant reminders of how important it is. Someone sent me a great example of this just the other day by virtue of a bug that had been lodged with Mozilla [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1348902]: > Your notice of insecure password and/or log-in automatically appearing on the log-in for my website, Oil and Gas International is not wanted and was put there without our permission....

Someone sent me an email today which essentially boiled down to this: > Hey, Microsoft's Azure Active Directory alerted me to leaked credentials but won't give me any details so there's very little I can do about it This is a really interesting scenario and it relates to the way Microsoft reports risk events [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-reporting-risk-events#leaked-credentials] , one of which is the discovery of leaked credentials that match those...

The tech news recently has seen quite a lot of chatter about an alleged haul of Apple credentials [http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-icloud-ransom-what-you-need-to-know/], apparently about 250 million of them in all. Allegedly. Maybe. Or was it 300 million? [https://www.macrumors.com/2017/03/22/apple-ransom-300m-icloud-accounts-claim/]. No - wait - it might have only been 200 million [http://mashable.com/2017/03/21/hackers-icloud-accounts-ransom/#VyYFdlgLMkqN]. The number itself has been the so...

I went to Helsinki a couple of years ago. I was there running a security workshop for a local company and whilst in town, I caught up with Mikko Hypponen [https://twitter.com/mikko]: > Troy Hunt (@troyhunt [https://twitter.com/troyhunt]) in Helsinki today. Troy's http://t.co/zOiZnkMpNo service is highly recommended! Use it. pic.twitter.com/lf59Hz7zvI [http://t.co/lf59Hz7zvI] — Mikko Hypponen (@mikko) May 28, 2015 [https://twitter.com/mikko/status/603890257814278144] Now Mikko is a very inter...

LastPass had an issue the other day [https://blog.lastpass.com/2017/03/security-update-for-the-lastpass-extension.html/] , a rather nasty one by all accounts that under certain (undisclosed) circumstances, it looks like it could lead to someone's password (or possibly passwords) being disclosed by virtue of a remote code execution vulnerability. This is not a good thing - nobody wants an RCE vuln in their software - but as is prone to happen with these incidents, some people went about promptly...

I've been watching the cyber-news pretty closely lately and one of the biggest challenges we seem to have is attribution. I mean, stuff is getting hacked left right and centre but who's actually responsible?? I started paying closer attention and I reckon I've worked it out - it's mostly this guy: He fits the profile to a tee - hoodie, obfuscated face and an apparent love of binary, all calling cards of the modern day cyber-hacker. As you can clearly see from the image, he's suspected of perp...

Organisations don't plan to fail. Probably the closest we get to that in the security space is password hashing, which for all intents and purposes is an acknowledgement that one day, you may well lose them. But organisations rarely plan for how they should handle data breaches and when an incident does happen (and that seems to be a near certainty these days), they're left unprepared; they're in unfamiliar territory, there's enormous stress and pressures on them and frankly, they usually react...

There's a seemingly endless flood of data breaches these days. Pretty much every day I get sent dumps from somewhere or other, usually websites I've never heard of and often dating back to compromises from years ago. They vary in size from thousands of accounts to many millions - and this is just the ones I've looked at. In short, there's way more data than I have time to process. Occasionally though, an incident floats to the top of the others which is what's happened over the last few days. T...

Earlier this week, I read a really interesting piece on 3 things that need to be done to save the web [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet] . The first observation was that "we’ve lost control of our personal data" and the author went on to observe the following: > As our data is then held in proprietary silos, out of sight to us, we lose out on the benefits we could realise if we had direct control over this data and chose when and with...

Only a couple of weeks ago, there were a lot of news headlines about how Germany had banned an internet-connected doll called "Cayla" over fears hackers could target children [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/germany-bans-internet-connected-dolls-fears-hackers-could-target/] . One of their primary concerns was the potential risk to the privacy of children: > conversations between the child and others can be recorded and forwarded The Germans had a good point: kids' toys which record...