Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, run "Have I Been Pwned" and am a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals
Visit troyhunt.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2011 – Aug 2026
Security & Privacy 111Web & Frontend 16Tech Industry & Business 12Society, Policy & Culture 6Hardware & Electronics 5Tools & Productivity 4
How best to punish spammers? I give this topic a lot of thought because I spend a lot of time sifting through the endless rubbish they send me. And that's when it dawned on me: the punishment should fit the crime - robbing me of my time - which means that
The penny first dropped for me just over 7 years ago to the day: The only secure password is the one you can't remember [https://www.troyhunt.com/only-secure-password-is-one-you-cant/]. In an era well before the birth of Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.
I'm increasingly of the view that both my time and my sanity are worth more and more as the years progress. Particularly in my independent life, it really can be that black and white - if I can't work, it costs me money. Plus, I want to be happy
It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point" [https://www.troyhunt.com/https-adoption-has-reached-the-tipping-point/], that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point] and as I said at the
You know what really surprised me about this whole WannaCry ransomware problem [https://www.troyhunt.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-wannacrypt-ransomware/]? No, not how quickly it spread. Not the breadth of organisations it took offline either and no, not even that so many of them hadn'
Many people will land on this page after learning that their email address has appeared in a data breach I've called "Collection #1". Most of them won't have a tech background or be familiar with the concept of credential stuffing so I'm going to write this post
I've got 2 massive things to announce today that have been a long time in the works and by pure coincidence, have aligned such that I can share them together here today. One you would have been waiting for and one totally out of left field. Both these announcements
Edit 1: The following day, I loaded another set of passwords which has brought this up to 320M. More on why later on. Edit 2: The API model described below has subsequently been discontinued [https://www.troyhunt.com/enhancing-pwned-passwords-privacy-by-exclusively-supporting-anonymity/] in favour of the
A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in analysing and reporting on the massive VTech hack [https://www.troyhunt.com/when-children-are-breached-inside/], the one where millions of records were exposed including kids' names, genders, ages, photos and the relationship to parents' records which included their
I was reticent to write this blog post because it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, questions that we should be able to answer. It's about a data breach with almost 90GB of personal information in it across tens of millions of records - including mine. Here's what I
In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, I wanna go fast [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qJGsSuFRIg]. When I launched Pwned Passwords V2 last week [https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/], I made it fast - real fast - and I want to talk briefly here
Today, I loaded the 1,000th data breach into Have I Been Pwned. Reflecting on that milestone number, I pondered how to mark the occasion in writing, and what immediately came to mind was a very simple question: why is it still needed? Especially considering the emergence of privacy regulations
Last week I wrote about my upcoming congressional testimony [https://www.troyhunt.com/im-testifying-in-front-of-congress-in-washington-dc-about-data-breaches-what-should-i-say/] and wow - you guys are awesome! Seriously, the feedback there was absolutely sensational and it's helped shape what I'll
In case you haven't noticed, we're on a rapid march towards a "secure by default" web when it comes to protecting traffic. For example, back in Feb this year, 20% of the Alexa Top 1 Million sites were forcing the secure scheme: These figures are from Scott Helme'
Only a couple of months ago, I did a talk titled "The Responsibility of Disclosure: Playing Nice and Staying Out of Prison". The basic premise was to illustrate where folks finding security vulnerabilities often go wrong in their handling of the reporting, but I also wanted to show how organisations
When someone passed me hundreds of thousands of records on kids taken from CloudPets a few years ago [https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/] , I had a nightmare of a time getting in touch with the company. They'd
There's no way to sugar-coat this: Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) only exists due to a whole bunch of highly illegal activity that has harmed many individuals and organisations alike. That harm extends all the way from those in data breaches feeling a sense of
Last week I wrote a couple of different pieces on passwords, firstly about why we're going to be stuck with them for a long time yet [https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-insert-thing-here-is-not-a-password-killer/] and then secondly, about how we all bear some
I found myself going down a previously unexplored rabbit hole recently, or more specifically, what I thought was "a" rabbit hole but in actual fact was an ever-expanding series of them that led me to what I refer to in the title of this post as "6 rabbits deep"
I've had this blog post in one form or another of draft for several years now. I hesitated to complete it, in part because at the best of times cultural observations can easily be misinterpreted and also in part because of the role I had in working with many
With the benefit of hindsight, this was a naïve question: > Alright clever IoT folks, I've got two of these garage door openers, what do you reckon the best way of connecting them with Apple HomeKit is? https://t.co/i0RmjSMkkD — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) April 25, 2020 [https://twitter.com/
As best I understand it, one of the most effective SEO things you can do is to repeat all the important words on your site down the bottom of the page. To save it from looking weird, you make the text the same colour as the background so people can'
Remember when OPM got breached last year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach]? There was a lot of excitement in various parts of the world (namely the US) because here we had a government department (Office of Personnel Management), and they’d just lost 21.
The situation in Minneapolis at the moment (and many other places in the US) following George Floyd's death [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_George_Floyd] is, I think it's fair to say, extremely volatile. I wouldn't even know where to begin commentary on that, but
I found myself in somewhat of a unique position last week: I’d made the Ashley Madison data searchable for verified subscribers of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and now – perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect – I was being inundated with email. I mean hundreds of emails every day
This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Secure Account Management Fundamentals" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/secure-account-management-fundamentals] Here’s the scenario – a user logs in to your website, comes back tomorrow and… has to log in again. The idea of the “remember me” feature – and
Who likes being treated like they’re in a minority group? Unless it means you’re in that exclusive group of playboy (or girl) billionaires, “minority group” often ends up with you being unfairly discriminated against because you don’t represent the perceived majority. As with social discrimination, technology…
I hate having to use that word - "alleged" - because it's so inconclusive and I know it will leave people with many unanswered questions. (Edit: 12 days after publishing this blog post, it looks like the "alleged" caveat can be dropped, see the addition at the end of the post
Back in July last year, Scott Helme and I shipped a little pet project that tracked the world's largest websites not implementing HTTPS by default [https://www.troyhunt.com/why-no-https-heres-the-worlds-largest-websites-not-redirecting-insecure-requests/] . We called it Why No HTTPS? [https://whynohttps.
Cookies like to get around. They have no scruples about where they go save for some basic constraints relating to the origin from which they were set. I mean have a think about it: If a website sets a cookie then you click a link to another page on that