Security

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 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...

The web is going HTTPS only. In theory. The idea is that unless we encrypt all the transport things, we can have no confidence in the confidentiality, integrity or authenticity of the traffic and services we’re talking to. There’s growing awareness of how essential secure transport comms are (thank you NSA for your part in helping us come to this realisation), and indeed we’re being continually pushed in this direction. For example, last year Google said they’d start using the presence of HTTPS...

A couple of months ago I wrote about how fellow author Dale Meredith and myself are building out an ethical hacking series on Pluralsight [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/05/its-ethical-hacking-with-sql-injection_21.html] and in that post I launched the first course I had written for the series on SQL injection. You can read about the ethical hacking series in that blog post and what my approach to covering the CEH syllabus has been (hint: I have my own take on it), but what I will again point out...

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...

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...

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...

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...