Weekly update

Why does it need to be a crazy data breach week right when I'm struggling with jet lag?! I came home from Europe just as a bunch of the Snowflake-sourced breaches started being publicly dumped, and things went a little crazy. Lots of data to review, lots of media enquiries and many discussions with impacted individuals, breached companies, incident response folks and law enforcement agencies. This situation is wreaking absolute havoc, and I suspect it has a way to run yet with only a small slice...

Ah, sunshine! As much as I love being back in Norway, the word "summer" is used very loosely there. Not as much in Greece, however, which is just spectacular: Finally escaped the bitterly cold Norwegian summer for something… warmer 🇬🇷 pic.twitter.com/jk9knZvJar — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) June 17, 2024 3 nights in Mykonos, 2 in Santorini and I'm pushing this post out just before our second night in Athens before embarking on the long journey home. It's been an experience, between the NDC ta...

What a week! The NDC opening keynote and 3D printing talk both went off beautifully, the latter being the first time for 11-year old Elle on stage: And the pro shots are really cool 😎 pic.twitter.com/ud7ad0pF1x — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) June 15, 2024 Videos of both will be available in the coming weeks so stay tuned for them. For now, we're at the end of a mostly cold and rainy Norwegian summer trip, heading to the sunny Greek isles for next week's update 😎 References 1. Sponsored...

I just watched back a little segment from this week's video and somehow landed at exactly the point where I said "I am starting to lose my patience with repeating the same thing over and over again" (about 46 mins if you want to skip to it), which is precisely how I wanted to start this post. In running HIBP for the last 10 and a bit years, there have been so many breaches where people have asked for the data within them beyond just the email address to be made available. As I say in the video,...

What a week! It was Ticketmaster that consumed the bulk of my time this week with the media getting themselves into a bit of a frenzy over a data breach that at the time of recording, still hadn't even been confirmed. But as predicted in the video, confirmation came late on a Friday arvo and since that time we've learned a lot more about just how bad the situation is. I'm going to save that discussion for Weekly Update 403 and between the time of writing this and going live, I'm sure we'll learn...

Ah, episode 401, the unauthorised one! Ok, that was terrible, but what's not terrible is finally getting some serious dev resources behind HIBP. I touch on it in the blog post but imagine all the different stuff I have to spread myself across to run this thing, and how much time is left for actual coding. By welcoming Stefan to the team we're not doubling or tripling or even quadrupling the potential dev hours, it's genuinely getting close to 10x. That's exciting, and it will result in both foun...

This is the 400th time I've sat down in front of the camera and done one of these videos. Every single week since the 23rd of September in 2016 regardless of location, health, stress and all sorts of other crazy things that have gone on in my life for nearly the last 8 years now, I've done a video. As with so many of the things I create, these are as much for me as they are for you; doing these videos every week has given me a regular cadence amidst some pretty crazy times. I've written before a...

The Post Millennial breach in this week's video is an interesting one, most notably because of the presence of the mailing lists. Now, as I've said in every piece of communication I've put out on this incident, the lists are what whoever defaced the site said TPM had and they certainly posted that data in the defacement message, but we're yet to hear a statement from the company itself. Taking it at face value, where does their responsibility lie as it relates to individuals in this data set? I...

How many different angles can you have on one data breach? Facial recognition (which probably isn't actual biometrics), gambling, offshore developers, unpaid bills, extortion, sloppy password practices and now, an arrest. On pondering it more after today's livestream, it's the unfathomable stupidity of publishing this data publicly that really strikes me. By all means, have contractual disputes, get lawyers involved and showdown in the courts if you need to, but take data in this fashion and chu...

Banks. They screw us on interest rates, they screw us on fees and they screw us on passwords. Remember the old "bank grade security" adage? I took this saying to task almost a decade ago now but it seems that at least as far as password advice goes, they really haven't learned. This week, Commbank is telling people to use a password manager but just not for their bank password, and ANZ bank is forcing people to rotate their passwords once a year because, uh, hackers? Ah well, as I always end up...