Weekly update

The ongoing scourge that is spyware (or, as it is commonly known, "stalkerware"), and the subsequent breaches that so often befall them continue to amaze me. More specifically, it's the way they tackle the non-consensual spying aspect of the service which, on the one hand is represented as a big "no-no" but on the others hand, the likes of Spytech in this week's update literally have a dedicated page for! Ok, so they say "get consent first" on the page, but only after pre-positioning the service...

Who would have thought that just a few hours after recording the previous week's video, the world would descend into what has undoubtedly become the largest IT outage we've ever seen: I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 19, 2024 By virtue of the CrowdStrike incident occurring in friendly office hours for my corner of the world, I was able to get a thread on it going pretty early on. That tweet above has been s...

It feels weird to be writing anything right now that isn't somehow related to Friday's CrowdStrike incident, but given I recorded this video just a few hours before all hell broke loose, it'll have to wait until next week. This week, the issue that really has me worked up is data breach victim notification or more specifically, lack thereof. Following my time in Melbourne and Canberra during the week where I spent a bunch of time with smart people close to the legal, political and law enforcemen...

I get the frustration and anger those working at organisations that have been breached feel, and I've seen it firsthand in my communications with them on so many prior occasions. They're the victim of a criminal act and they're rightly outraged. However... thinking back to similar examples to The Heritage Foundation situation this week, I can't think of a single case where losing your mind and becoming abusive has ever worked out well. In fact, it usually just has the effect of losing the victim...

It's a long one this week, in part due to the constant flood of new breaches and disclosures I discuss. I regularly have disclosure notices forwarded to me by followers who find themselves in new breaches, and it's always fascinating to hear how they're worded. You get a real sense of how much personal ownership a company is taking, how much blame they're putting back on the hackers and increasingly, how much they've been written by lawyers. That last one, in particular, seems to have a knack fo...

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...