Security

This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Ethical Hacking: SQL Injection" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/ethical-hacking-sql-injection]Yes, yes, it’s happened again – OWASP’s number one risk in the Top 10 [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/05/owasp-top-10-for-net-developers-part-1.html] has featured prominently in a high-profile attack this time resulting in the leak of over 40,000 records from Bell in Canada [http://o.canada.com/technology/bell-canada-security-breach-391451/]. I...

Let’s just start here [https://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq]: Allow me to provide a technical security perspective on this – it’s complete bullshit. More specifically, you’re seeing this because whoever designed the Smashwords site screwed up and embedded insecure content in a page loaded over a secure connection. So what does this look like? Here’s an example in Internet Explorer: But more importantly, what does it actually mean? Short answer: you can’t trust the page any more tha...

It’s about six weeks into the life of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com] now and I’m enormously pleased with the reception its received. The fact that I’ve had to write posts like the micro optimisation one [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/micro-optimising-web-content-for.html] or the one about getting too big for Google [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/too-big-for-google-when-analytics-fails.html] and had to deal with all the problems I’ve discussed there has actually been a very...

I was amused (and frankly a little bewildered) the other day to see this bloke in the paper [http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/brisbane-motorist-fined-for-leaving-car-window-slightly-down-on-hot-day/story-fnihsrf2-1226793936291] : What he’s holding there is a fine… for leaving his car windows down a little. You see, the police down here took a view that in doing so he was inviting criminals to break into his car by very clearly leaving his security in a compromised state. This, in...

Did you know that every time you submit a Web Forms page it sends a hash-based message authentication code with it so that the website can ensure the View State hasn’t been tampered with? Or that every time you use the MVC Razor syntax to emit anything to the page it HTML encodes it? Unless, of course, you’re using the Html.Raw helper – oh and that none of that does you any good in the JavaScript and CSS contexts or the HTML attribute context? Were you aware that ASP.NET limits the size of the...

Well we almost made it through the first day of the new year without a major data breach; it got to about mid-afternoon my time then wammo! The 2014 breach count was off and racing. If I’m honest, I actually spent some procrastinating over whether this could really be considered a breach and indeed if the data was even of any functional value to an attacker. I came to the conclusion that it is and, well, it is. Let me explain the thinking and why I’ve made it searchable via Have I been pwned? [...

Just under three weeks ago now, I launched Have I been pwned? [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/introducing-have-i-been-pwned.html] which could tell you if you owned one of 154 million email addresses that had been caught up in recent data breaches. Subsequently, the site turned out to be wildly popular [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/introducing-have-i-been-pwned.html] and as with such things, a lot of good ideas came up in terms of features people would like to see. Without doubt, the numbe...

I got a lot of requests after launching HIBP for an API and I saw some great ideas come up in terms of how it might be used for very constructive purposes. Truth be told, there was an API from day one insofar as this was precisely what the web UI was hitting every time you searched for an email address anyway, I just hadn’t published any docs on it or promoted its existence. That said, I did give it a bit of tweaking to make it more “RESTful” (this, apparently, is what all APIs must be these da...

I often write up analyses of the passwords disclosed in website breaches. For example, there was A brief Sony password analysis [https://www.troyhunt.com/2011/06/brief-sony-password-analysis.html] back in mid-2011 and then our local Aussie ABC earlier this year where I talked about Lousy ABC cryptography cracked in seconds as Aussie passwords are exposed [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/02/lousy-abc-cryptography-cracked-in.html]. I wrote a number of other pieces looking specifically at the nature...

I’m frequently amused by the sort of stuff my Facebook friends “like”. For example: The more salacious content you find around Facebook often has a hidden agenda, for example the classic She did WHAT in school [https://www.troyhunt.com/2012/10/she-did-what-in-school-mechanics-of.html] scam I wrote about last year. Snapchat [http://www.snapchat.com/] allows you to take a pic or a video and set an expiry date after which it’s “theoretically” destroyed, just the sort of stuff that appeals to sex...