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Data breach verification: that seems like a good place to start given the discussion in this week's video about Accor. Watch the vid for the whole thing but in summary, data allegedly taken from Accor was published to a popular hacking forum and the headlines inevitably followed. However, per that story:
Cybernews couldn’t confirm the authenticity of the data. We reached out to Accor for clarification and are awaiting a response.
I couldn't confirm the authenticity of the data either and I wrote a short thread about it during the week:
I'm not convinced this data is from Accor. There are barely any references to "accor" in the data and the ones that are there just look like records where Accor is a customer of another service. https://t.co/4rT17eNQ7J
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) April 11, 2024
Yet that headline very clearly stated there'd been a breach, as did the SC News one a few days later: Accor database exposed by IntelBroker. So... no independent verification and no statement from the company, yet a headline stating a publicly listed multinational with billions of dollars of annual revenue has had customer data exposed. That's, uh, "brave" 😲
I suggest, based on my experiences with data breaches over the years, that AT&T is about to have a very bad time of it. Class actions following data breaches have become all too common and I've written before about how much I despise them. The trouble for AT&T (in my non-legal but "hey, I'm the data breach guy" opinion), will be their denial of a breach in 2021 and the subsequent years in which tens of millions of social security numbers were floating around. As much as it's hard for the victim of identity theft to say "this happened because of that breach", it's also hard for the corporate victim of a breach to say that identity theft didn't happen because of their breach. Particularly in such a litigious part of the world, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the legal cost of this runs into the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. I doubt the plaintiffs will see much of this, but there's sure going to be some happy lawyers out there!
A serious but not sombre intro this week: I mentioned at the start of the vid that I had the classic visor hat on as I'd had a mole removed from my forehead during the week, along with another on the back of my hand. Here in Australia, we have one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world with apparently about two-thirds of us being diagnosed with it before turning 70. At present, the bits they cut off me were entirely unremarkable (small dot about an inch over my left eye if you're really curious), but the point I wanted to make was what I mentioned in the video about us doing annual checks; every year, we voluntarily front up at the GP and he checks (almost) every square inch of skin for stuff that we'd never normally notice but under the microscope, may look a bit dodgy. It's an absolute no-brainer that takes about 10 minutes and if he does decide to remove something, there's another 10 minutes and a stitch. If you're in the sun a lot like us, just do it 🙂
With that community service notice done, let's get into today's video:
Let's get straight to the controversial bit: email address validation. A penny-drop moment during this week's video was that the native browser address validator rejects many otherwise RFC compliant forms. As an example, I asked ChatGTP about the validity of the pipe symbol during the live stream and according to the AI, it's permissible "when properly quoted":
FreshRSS 
"john|doe"@example.comGive that a go and see how far you get in an input of type "email". Mind you, that example allows a pipe when not quoted. And the more you read, the more contradictory things seem; try this Stack Overflow question about allowable characters in an address and you'll get a heap of "yeah, that one is allowed but only if quoted"... which means it won't work in an email input box! (Unless you use the "pattern" attribute and a regex that permits it - argh!)
tl;dr - especially for the purpose in question - extracting email addresses from a data dump - I think I'm just going to boilthis down to a handful of permissible characters that are broadly accepted by websites and just stick with those. If you're a unique enough snowflake to be putting a quoted pipe in your alias then you're clearly not signing up to very many websites.
I'm in Japan! Without tripod, without mic and having almost completely forgotten to do this vid, simply because I'm enjoying being on holidays too much 😊 It was literally just last night at dinner the penny dropped - "don't I normally do something around now...?" The weeks leading up to this trip were especially chaotic and to be honest, I simply forgot all about work once we landed here. And when you see the pics in the thread below, you'll understand why:
Tokyo time! 🍣 pic.twitter.com/dG0Ja60eQb
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 13, 2024
Regardless, this week has a bunch of content primarily on the Onerep mess; can you imagine a company selling services to remove your data from the other services they're running?! That's the Krebs position and the story is a great read so go and check that out. We may not have heard the end of it yet either, especially given the Mozilla situation.
How on earth are we still here? You know, that place where breached companies stand up and go all Iraqi information minister on the incident as if somehow, flatly denying the blatantly obvious will make it all go away. It's the ease of debunking the "no breach here" claim that I find particularly fascinating; the truth is always sitting there in the data and it doesn't take much to bring it to the surface. Ah well, as I always end up lamenting, with behaviour like this it's a good time to be in the industry 🤷♂️
It's just been a joy to watch the material produced by the NCA and friends following the LockBit takedown this week. So much good stuff from the agencies themselves, not just content but high quality trolling too. Then there's the whole ecosystem of memes that have since emerged and provided endless hours of entertainment 😊 I'm sure we'll see a lot more come out of this yet and inevitably there's seized material that will still be providing value to further investigations years from now. Good job folks!
It's a short video this week after a few days in Sydney doing both NDC and the Azure user group. For the most part, I spoke about the same things as I did at NDC Security in Oslo last month... except that since then we've had the Spoutibe incident. It was fascinating to talk about this in front of a live audience and see everyone's reactions first hand, let's just say there were a lot of "oh wow!" responses 😲
Somehow, an hour and a half went by in the blink of an eye this week. The Spoutible incident just has so many interesting aspects to it: loads of data that should never be returned publicly, awesome response time to the disclosure, lacklustre transparency in their disclosure, some really fundamental misunderstands about hashing algorithms and a controversy-laden past if you read back over events of the last year. Phew! No wonder so much time went on this! (and if you want to just jump directly to the Spoutible bits, that's at the 8:50 mark)
I told ya so. Right from the beginning, it was pretty obvious what "MOAB" was probably going to be and sure enough, this tweet came true:
Interesting find by @MayhemDayOne, wonder if it was from a shady breach search service (we’ve seen a bunch shut down over the years)? Either way, collecting and storing this data is now trivial so not a big surprise to see someone screw up their permissions and (re)leak it all. https://t.co/DM7udeUcRk
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) January 22, 2024
What I didn't know at the time was the hilarity of how similar this service would be to those that had come before it... and been shut down by law enforcement agencies. I mean seriously, when you're literally copying and pasting clauses from LeakedSource, what do you think is going to happen?! I sense another "I told ya so" coming...
I spent longer than I expected talking about Trello this week, in part because I don't feel the narrative they presented properly acknowledges their responsibility for the incident and in part because I think the impact of scraping in general is misunderstood. I suspect many of us are prone to looking at this in a very binary fashion: if the data is publicly accessible anyway, scraping it poses no risk. But in my view, there's a hell of a big difference between say, looking at one person's personal info on LinkedIn via the browser versus having a corpus of millions of records of the same data saved offline. That's before we even get into the issue of whether in Trello's case, it should ever be possible for a third party to match email address to username and IRL name.
To add some more perspective, I've just posted a poll immediately before publishing this blog post, let's see what the masses have to say:
Scraping: should we be concerned if an individual's personal data is scraped, aggregated en mass and redistributed if that same data is already publicly accessible on the service anyway? Vote and if possible, add more context in a reply.
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) January 28, 2024
They're an odd thing, credential lists. Whether they're from a stealer as in this week's Naz.API incident, or just aggregated from multiple data breaches (which is also in Naz.API), I inevitably get some backlash after loading them: "this doesn't tell me anything useful, why are you loading this?!" The answer is easy: because that's what the vast majority of people want me to do:
If I have a MASSIVE spam list full of personal data being sold to spammers, should I load it into @haveibeenpwned?
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) November 15, 2016
Spam lists are the same kettle of fish in that once you learn you're in one, I can't provide you any further info about where it came from and there's no recourse available to you. You're just in there, good luck! And if you do find yourself in one of these lists and are unhappy not that you're in there, but rather that I've told you you're in there, you have 2 easy options:
Or, if you've come along to HIBP, done a search and then been unhappy with me, my guitar lessons blog post is an entertaining read 😊
That's all from Europe folks, see you from the sunny side next week!
Geez it's nice to be back in Oslo! This city has such a special place in my heart for so many reasons, not least of which by virtue of being Charlotte's home town we have so many friends and family here. Add in NDC Security this week with so many more mutual connections, beautiful snowy weather, snowboarding, sledging and even curling, it's just an awesome time. Awesome enough to still be here for the next weekly update so until then, I'll leave you with the pics I promised at the end of this week's vid. Enjoy 😊
Perfect Oslo - fresh snow, cool temps and sunshine 🇳🇴 pic.twitter.com/yPtnCkKIwo
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) January 15, 2024
It's another weekly update from the other side of the world with Scott and I in Rome as we continue a bit of downtime before hitting NDC Security in Oslo next week. This week, Scott's sharing details of how he and Joe Tiedman registered a domain Capelli Sport let lapse and now have their JavaScript running on the websites shopping cart page (check your browser console after loading that link) 😲 That's not the crazy bit though, the crazy bit is the months they've spent trying to disclose this to Capelli and getting absolutely nowhere. I'll give them a shout-out this week and see if I have any more luck but when it's this hard to report egregiously bad security issues, is it any wonder we have so many data breaches. As I keep lamenting, it's a great time to be in this industry...
We're in Paris! And feeling proper relaxed after several days of wine and cheese too, I might add. This was a very impromptu end of 2023 weekly update as we balanced family time with doing the final video for the year. On the cyber side, the constant theme over the last week has been ransomware; big firms, little firms, Aussie firms, American firms - it's just completely indiscriminate. Anecdotally, this seems to have really ramped up over 2023 so on that basis, 2024 will bring... well, let's wait and see, this industry is nothing if not full of surprises. Happy New Year friends 😊
It's that time of the year again, time to head from the heat to the cold as we jump on the big plane(s) back to Europe. The next 4 weekly updates will all be from places of varying degrees colder than home, most of them done with Scott Helme too so they'll be a little different to usual. For now, here's a pretty casual Christmas edition, see you next week from the other side 🙂
I'd say the balloon fetish segment was the highlight of this week's video. No, seriously, it's a moment of levity in an otherwise often serious industry. It's still a bunch of personal info exposed publicly and that suchs regardless of the nature of the site, but let's be honest, the subject matter did make for some humorous comments 🤣
10 years later... 🤯 Seriously, how did this thing turn into this?! It was the humblest of beginning with absolutely no expectations of anything, and now it's, well, massive! I'm a bit lost for words if I'm honest, I hope the chat with Charlotte adds some candour to this week's update, she's seen this thing grow since before its first birthday, through the hardest times and the best times and now lives and breathes HIBP day in day out with me. I hope you enjoy this video, and we'd both love to hear those swag ideas from you too 😊
I'm irrationally excited about the new Prusa 3D printer on order, and I think that's mostly to do with planning for the NDC Oslo talk I plan to do with Elle, my 11-year old daughter. I'm all for getting the kids exposure not just to tech, but also to being able to talk to others about tech and involving them in conference talks since a young age has been a big part of that. But what I'm especially excited about is that this won't just be an "aw, isn't it cute seeing kids talk at a conference" kinda thing; she genuinely knows enough about this technology that together, we can make a talk that adults will learn something from. That's cool 😎
For a weekly update with no real agenda, we sure did spend a lot of time talking about the ridiculous approach Harvey Norman took to dealing with heavy traffic on Black Friday. It was just... unfathomable. A bunch of people chimed into the tweet thread and suggested it may have been by design, but they certainly wouldn't have set out to achieve the sorts of headlines that adorned the news afterwards. Who knows, but it made for entertaining content this week 🙂
Think about it like this: in 2015, we all lost our proverbial minds at the idea of the Kazakhstan government mandating the installation of root certificates on their citizens' devices. We were outraged at the premise of a government mandating the implementation of a model that could, at their bequest, allow them to intercept traffic without any transparency or accountability. The EFF said the following at the time:
If the country's ruling regime were to successfully implement this plan, it would be able to snoop on, impersonate, and alter the online communications of anyone within their borders—effectively performing a Man in the Middle attack on its entire population.
Now watch the video, listen to Scott and ask yourself how different the technical capacity he discusses is from the Kazakhstan situation. Not from a policy perspective or the intentions of the respective government bodies, but rather it terms of the capabilities and lack of transparency it results in. It's nuts. But hey, it's a good time to be in this industry!
Most of this week's video went on the scraped (and faked) LinkedIn data, but it's the ransomware discussion that keeps coming back to mind. Even just this morning, 2 days after recording this live stream, I ended up on nation TV talking about the DP World security incident and whilst we don't have any confirmation yet, it has all the hallmarks of another ransomware case. In advance of that interview, I was trawling through various ransomware Tor sites and the volume of big names appearing there is just staggering. It does get me thinking: how many other individuals and corporations alike are being exposed through these and are never told about it? I wonder...
Yes, the Lenovo is Chinese. No, I'm not worried about Superfish. Yes, I'm running windows. No, I don't want a Framework laptop. Seemed to be a lot of time this week gone on talking all things laptops, and there are clearly some very differing views on the topic. Some good suggestions, some neat alternatives and some ideas that, well, just seem a little crazy. But hey, I'm super happy with the machine, it's an absolute beast and I expect I'll get many years of hard work out of it. That and more in this week's video, enjoy 😊
So I wrapped up this week's live stream then promptly blew hours mucking around with Zigbee on Home Assistant. Is it worth it, as someone asked in the chat? Uh, yeah, kinda, mostly. But seriously, having a highly automated house is awesome and I suggest that most people watching these vids harbour the same basic instinct as I do to try and improve our lives through technology. The coordination of lights with times of day, the security checks around open doors, the controlling of fans and air conditioning to keep everyone comfy, it just rocks... when it works 😎
I did it again - I tweeted about Twitter doing something I thought was useful and the hordes did descend on Twitter to tweet about how terrible Twitter is. Right, gotcha, so 1.3M views of that tweet later... As I say in this week's video, there's a whole bunch of crazy arguments in there but the thing that continues to get me the most in every one of these discussions is the argument that Elon is a poo poo head. No, seriously, I explain it at the end of the video how so constantly the counterarguments have no rational base and they constantly boil down to a dislike of the guy. Ironically, continuing to use Twitter to have a rant about stuff just shows that Twitter is just the same as it always was 🤣
There seemed to be an awful lot of time gone on the 23andMe credential stuffing situation this week, but I think it strikes a lot of important chords. We're (us as end users) still reusing credentials, still not turning on MFA and still trying to sue when we don't do these things. And we as builders are still creating systems that allow this to happen en mass. All that said, I don't know how we build systems that are resilient to a single person coming along and entering someone else's (probably) reused credentials into a normal browser session, at least not without introducing additional barriers to entry that will upset the marketing manager. And so, I'm back at the only logical conclusion I think we can all agree on right now: it's a great time to be working in this industry 😊
This must be my first "business as usual" weekly update since August and damn it's nice to be back to normal! New sponsor, new breaches, new blog post and if you're in this part of the world, a brand new summer creeping over the horizon. I've now got a couple of months with very little in the way of travel plans and a goal to really knock a bunch of new HIBP features out of the park, some of which I talk about in this week's video. Enjoy! 🍻
Ah, home 😊 It's been more than a month since I've been able to sit at this desk and stream a weekly video. And now I'm doing it with the glorious spring weather just outside my window, which I really must make more time to start enjoying. Anyway, this week is super casual due to having had zero prep time, but I hope the discussion about the ABC's piece on HIBP and I in particular is interesting. I feel like this whole story has a long way to go yet, hopefully now having a few months at home will give us an opportunity to lay the foundation for the next phase. Stay tuned!
Well that's it, Europe is done! I've spent the week in Prague with highlights including catching up with Josef Prusa, keynoting at Experts Live EU and taking a "beer spa" complete with our own endless supply of tap beer. Life is good 🍻
That’s it - we’ve peaked - life is all downhill from here 🤣 🍻 #BeerSpa pic.twitter.com/ezCpUC6XEK
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 21, 2023
All that and more in this week's video, next week I'll come to you from back home in the sunshine 😎
It's another week of travels, this time from our "second home", Oslo. That's off the back of 4 days in the Netherlands and starting tomorrow, another 4 in Prague. But today, the 17th of September, is extra special 😊
1 year today ❤️ pic.twitter.com/vsRChdDshn
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 17, 2023
We'll be going out and celebrating accordingly as soon as I get this post published so I'll be brief: enjoy this week's video!
I'm super late pushing out this week's video, I mean to the point where I now have a couple of days before doing the next one. Travel from the opposite side of the world is the obvious excuse, then frankly, just wanting to hang out with friends and relax. And now, I somehow find myself publishing this from the most mind-bending set of circumstances:
Heading to 31C. Cold beer. Warm pool. How is this in England?! 🤯 pic.twitter.com/tQSbHaoLhG
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 6, 2023
On that note, straight into the video, links below and I'll do it all again in a couple of days from Spain:
Somehow in this week's video, I forgot to talk about the single blog post I wrote this week! So here's the elevator pitch: Cloudflare's Turnstile is a bot-killing machine I've had enormous success with for the "API" (quoted because it's not meant to be consumed by others), behind the front page of HIBP. It's unintrusive, is super easy to implement and kills bots dead. There you go, how's that for a last minute pitch? 😊
This week hasd been manic! Non-stop tickets related to the new HIBP domain subscription service, scrambling to support invoicing and resellers, struggling our way through some odd Stripe things and so on and so forth. It's all good stuff and there have been very few issues of note (and all of those have merely been people getting to grips with the new model), so all in all, it's happy days 😊
So about those domain searches... 😊 The new subscription model launched this week and as many of you know from your own past experiences, pushing major new code live is always a bit of a nail-biting exercise. It went out silently on Sunday morning, nothing major broke so I published the blog post Monday afternoon then emailed all the existing API key subscribers Tuesday morning and now here we are!
One thing I talk a bit about in the video today are the 2 new APIs someone reached out and requested. This was an awesome idea and I can't wait to show you what they've built with them. I expect I'll blog that this coming week and probably quietly slip out the documentation on the 2 new endpoints in advance. Stay tuned for that one, what he's done with this looks so cool 😎
Somewhere in the next few hours from publishing this post, I'll finally push the HIBP domain search changes live. I've been speaking about it a lot in these videos over recent weeks so many of you have already know what it entails, but it's the tip of the iceberg you've seen publicly. This is the culmination of 7 months of work to get this model right with a ridiculous amount of background effort having gone into it. Case in point: read my pain from last night about converting thousands of words of lawyer speak T&Cs from Microsoft Word to HTML. As if preparing these wasn't painful enough, trying to make them simply play nice on a web page has been a nightmare! (I settled for dumping stuff in a <pre> tag for now and will invest the time in doing it right later on.)
I hope you enjoy this week's video, I'll talk much more about the domain search bits in the next video, hopefully following a successful launch!
IoT, breaches and largely business as usual so I'll skip that in the intro to this post and jump straight to the end: the impending HIBP domain search changes. As I say in the vid, I really value people's feedback on this so if nothing else, please skip through to 48:15, listen to that section and let me know what you think. By the time I do next week's vid my hope is that all the coding work is done and I'm a couple of days out from shipping it, so now is your time to provide input if you think there's something I'm missing that really should be in there 🙂
Sad news to wake up to today. Kevin was a friend and as I say in this week's video, probably the most well-known identity in infosec ever, and for good reason. He made a difference, and I have fun memories with him 😊
Felt really sad waking up and seeing “RIP Kevin” in my timeline. I doubt there is a more well known name in our industry but if he’s unfamiliar to you (or you haven’t read this book), go and grab “Ghost in the Wires” which is an exceptional read.
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 20, 2023
Kevin started regularly coming… pic.twitter.com/w1UMm7mGa8
In other news, I share a lot more on the upcoming domain search changes in this week's video and I've gotta say, I'm feeling pretty good about them. I spent most of the day after recording this writing code and drafting the blog post and I'm pretty damn happy with each right now. I'll keep sharing more info via these updates to the extent that by the time everything launches in a couple of weeks, you'll know it all anyway if you're paying attention here 😎
Today was a bit back-to-back having just wrapped up the British Airways Magecart attack webinar with Scott. That was actually a great session with loads of engagement and it's been recorded to so look out for that one soon if you missed it. Anyway, I filled this week's update with a bunch of random things from the week. I especially enjoyed discussing the HIBP domain search progress and as I say in the video, talking through it with other people really helps crystalise things so I think I'll keep doing that as the dev work continues. Stay tuned for more on that next week, see you then 😊
Alrighty, "The Social Media". Without adding too much here as I think it's adequately covered in the video, since last week we've had another change at Twitter that has gotten some people cranky (rate limits) and another social media platform to jump onto (Threads). I do wonder how impactful the 1k tweet view limit per day is for most people (I have no idea how many I usually see, I just know I've never hit the limit yet), and as I say in the video, I find it increasingly hard to tell when community outrage is evidence-based versus "because Elon". Strange times, for now I'll just keep a foot in each camp and then who knows how the whole thing will play out in the future.
I'm in Thailand! It's spectacular here, and even more so since recording this video and getting out of Bangkok and into the sorts of natural beauty you see in all the videos. Speaking of which, rather than writing more here (whilst metres away from the most amazing scenery), I'm going to push the publish button on this week's video and go enjoy it. Seeya! 😊
This feels like a week of minor frustrations with little real world consequence but they just bugged the hell out of me. Couldn't record in my office due to a weird ground loop problem, my Home Assistant instance was unexpectedly rebooting, the Yale IoT door locks had near unprecedentedly bad UX... and then I saw Miele's IoT 😭 Other than that, everything is fine 😊
Domain searches in HIBP - that's the story this week - and I'm grateful for all the feedback I've received. I've had a few messages in particular since this live stream where people gave me some really excellent feedback to the point where I've now got a much clearer plan in head as to what this will look like. I need to keep writing code, revising the draft blog post to announce it then sometime in hopefully about a month, push it all live. What I'm zero'ing in on now is a free tier that covers most domains, a very low entry fee for almost every personal or small business case you can think of and then a few tiers above that to cover the rest. Do keep that feedback coming, it's all read, it's all taken onboard and I'm responding to absolutely everyone that sends it to me. If you're one of those people, thank you 😊
I spent most of this week's update on the tweaking I went through with Azure's API Management service and then using Cloudflare to stop a whole bunch of requests that really didn't need to go all the way to the origin (or at least all the way to the API gateway sitting in front of the origin Azure Function instance). I'm still blown away by how cool this is - tweak the firewall via a web UI to inspect traffic and respond differently based on a combination of headers and response codes and bam! A massive reduction in unnecessary traffic follows. That's so cool, I love cloud 😊
And so ends a long period of back-to-back weeks of conferences and talks. It's funny how these things seem to cluster together at times and whilst the last 6 or 8 weeks (I honestly lose track!) have been chaotic, I've now got a few weeks of much less pressure which will give me time to finally push out some HIBP stuff that's been in the wings for ages. I've just got to get through this weekend first, stay tuned for pics on social for that, it's going to be pretty epic 😎
This week's update is dominated by my experience with "Lena", the scammer from Gumtree who tried to fleece my wife of $800. There's a blow-by-blow rundown of how it all happened in this video and it's fascinating to think that these things can actually be successful given all the red flags. But they are, and in Australia alone innocent victims are stung to the tune of more than 3 billion dollars every year by fraudsters which is a staggering number. Understanding how these scams work and sharing that knowledge broadly with the less technical of those around us is part of how to combat this, so please share the tweet thread generously... and enjoy the entertainment 😊
I feel like the .zip TLD debate is one of those cases where it's very easy for the purest security view to overwhelm the practical human reality. I'm yet to see a single good argument that is likely to have real world consequences as far as phishing goes and whilst I understand the sentiment surrounding the confusion new TLDs with common file types, all "the sky is falling" commentary I've seen is speculative at best. But hey, there's no rolling it back now, we can start judging by what actually happens with the TLD rather than sitting around creating misuse hypotheses.
A late one this week as I cover from the non-stop conferencing that was the Azure user group in Perth, followed by the Cyber West keynote, then the social drinks that night, the flight back home straight into the AusCERT gala dinner, the panel on data governance that morning then wrapping up with the speed debate Friday arvo. I think that's all... Anyway, better later than never and nothing too serious in this week's update. Personally, I'm finding the house works the most fun to talk about so I'm going to hit the publish button on this post now then go back to drafting the blog series on everything we've done 😊
It's a bit of a mixed bag this week with a very light-hearted look at the death of the browser padlock icon (which has been replaced by an icon that looks like a sex act), and a much more serious discussion about divorce. It took a long time to write and be ready to publish that blog post, many years in fact, but I'm so glad I did. You don't have to scroll far through the responses to the launch tweet or the comments on the blog itself to get a sense of how it's impacted people, and as I said in the very opening of the post, this sort of openness tends to be really well received. Wherever you are in your own stage of life, I hope you enjoying reading that post and share it generously with those for whom it might just make a real difference.
I stand by my expression in the image above. It's a perfectly accurate representation of how I looked after receiving the CityJerks breach, clicking on the link to the website then seeing what it actually was 😳 Fortunately, the published email address on their site did go through to someone at TruckerSucker (😳😳) so they're aware of the breach and that it's circulating broadly via a public hacking website. That segment is last up in this week's video and I do give fair warning just in case you're not in the best environment to be watching that part of the update. Viewer discretion advised!
I feel like a significant portion of this week's video went to discussing "the Coinbase breach that wasn't a Coinbase breach". There are various services out there that are used by the likes of password managers to alert their customers to new breaches (including HIBP in 1Password) and whoever Dashlane is using frankly, royally cocked up the attribution. What was a garden variety list of email addresses someone had just chucked the "Coinbase" name on had absolutely nothing to do with a breach of the crypto company. It's frustrating to watch, and I suspect that will come through when you watch the video too. See what you think.
A bit late this week as I've prioritised time out with the family doing as many New Zealand adventure things as we can. And we've seriously maxed out the time, as you can see via the FB link below. But that hasn't stopped a couple of new data breaches flowing into HIBP nor me having some pretty direct thoughts on the premise that the vast bulk of IT pros are being told not to report data breaches. I hope you enjoy this impromptu vid from a faraway location at an odd time, I'll be back to normal again next week.
Next time I post a poll about something as simple as "when is next Friday", I don't expect I'll get as much interest. Of course "next time" will be whatever poll follows the last one, not the poll that falls after that one! But more seriously, I cannot think of a better example of ambiguous language that's open to interpretation and so easily avoided (hello MM-DD people!)
Also, Genesis Market and Operation Cookie Monster. This is just amazing stuff and a testament to a coalition of law enforcement agencies across the globe that have now made well over 100 arrests. Off the back of the NCA's DDoS market honeypot, the BreachForums admin arrest and the takedown of RaidForums before that, if you're playing in this space you'd have to be looking over your shoulder by now. Interesting times in cyber(crime) space.
Most of this week's video went on talking about the UniFi Dream Wall. What a unit! I mean it's big, but then it wraps a lot of stuff up in the one device too. If you watch this and have thoughts on how I can integrate it into the new garage such that it doesn't clash with the dark theme, I'd love to hear about it. I'll share more once I set it up in the coming weeks but for now, enjoy this week's video 🙂
I'm excited about coming to Prague. One more country to check off the list, apparently a beautiful city and perhaps what I'm most stoked about, it's the home of Prusa 3D. Writing this as I wrangle prints out of my trusty MK3S+, I'm going to do my best to catch up with folks there and see some of the super cool stuff they're doing. Other than that, this week is full of the usual; data breaches, IoT and a cold 🍺
Why can't I audio right? It's my 339th video and I still make mistakes 🙂 But it came good and we got a decent show out of it with lots of interesting engagement even though doing this a lot later in the day than usual. I found the discussion around IoT door locks especially interesting as it's a real nexus of security, usability and a bit of critical thinking about real world risks. That term "security absolutism" that came up in the comments is gold, I hope you enjoy watching this episode.
I'm going lead this post with where I finished the video because it brought the biggest smile to Charlotte's and my faces this week:
This. Is. Amazing 😍 pic.twitter.com/wOl4kpK841
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 3, 2023
When I talked about the McLaren in this week's video, Frits made the comment "the smile on your face says it all", which absolutely nailed it. But more than that, it brings a smile to the face of everyone who sees it (I suspect the colour helps), we're just loving seeing the excitement expressed by kids and adults alike. It's so much fun 😊
Less fun is dealing with Eye4Fraud. 24 hours on from recording this video, there's still zero visible progress and I lament that this one is just going to slip beneath the radar. If you're in the breach, do push for answers, it really shouldn't be this hard. All that and more in this week's video, enjoy!
Guns! You know, the things you kinda want to keep pretty well protected and out of the hands of nefarious parties, like the kinds of folks that following their data breach could match firearms to an individual at an address on a phone number of a gender and specific age. But don't worry, no financial information was compromised! 🤦♂️
All that and more in the 337th addition of my weekly update, enjoy!
Hey, it's double-Troy! I'm playing with the Insta360 Link cam, a gimbal-based model that can follow you around the room. It's tiny and pretty awesome for what it is, I'm doing some back-to-back with that and my usual Sony a6400 this week. A little note on that: during the live stream someone suggested there was some lag from that camera (very minor, they suggested), but others couldn't see it. I've just been watching a bit of the video while writing up this post and I reckon they're right. Try the 3:02 mark, for example, where on Insta360 Link I have my finger up but on the Sony a6400, I don't:
It's very minor, but it's just enough to notice. Anyway, see what you think, all that a much more in weekly update 336:
No cyber. It's literally a "cyber-free" week, as least far as the term relates to security things. Instead, I'm unboxing an armful of Insta360 goodies and lamenting the state of IoT whilst putting even more IoT things into our massive garage renovation. I'm enjoying it though. Honestly. I think...
