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
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Today, we welcome the 47th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Nepal. Their National Cyber Security Centre now has access to monitor Nepalese government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives the NCSC the ability to identify exposure across government email addresses and respond
I've investigated hundreds of data breaches over the years (there are 514 of them in Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] as I write this), and for the most part, the situation with Gab is just another day on the internet. But Gab is also different, having grown
I get a lot of people popping up with data breaches for Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP). There’s an interesting story in that itself actually, one I must get around to writing in the future as folks come from all sorts of different backgrounds and offer
These days, I get a lot of messages from people on security related things. Often it's related to data breaches or sloppy behaviour on behalf of some online service playing fast and loose with HTTPS or passwords or some other easily observable security posture. But on a fairly regular
You know how security people get all uppity about SSL this and SSL that? Stuff like posting creds over HTTPS isn’t enough, you have to load login forms over HTTPS as well and then you can’t send auth cookies over HTTP because they’ll get sniffed and sessions
This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Ethical Hacking: SQL Injection" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/ethical-hacking-sql-injection]Put on your black hats folks, it’s time to learn some genuinely interesting things about SQL injection. Now remember – y’all play nice with the bits and
The very first feature I added to Have I Been Pwned after I launched it back in December 2013 was the public API [https://www.troyhunt.com/have-i-been-pwned-you-can-now-ask-api/]. My thinking at the time was that it would make the data more easily
Sometimes the discussion around extended validation certificates (EV) feels a little like flogging a dead horse. In fact, it was only September that I proposed EV certificates are already dead [https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-dead/] for all sorts of good reasons that have only been…
It's finally time: it's time the pendulum swings further towards the "secure by default" end of the scale than what it ever has before. At least insofar as securing web traffic goes because as of this week's Chrome 62's launch, any website with an input box
This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Secure Account Management Fundamentals" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/secure-account-management-fundamentals] Recently I’ve had a couple of opportunities to think again about how a secure password reset function should operate, firstly whilst building this…
tl;dr - a collection of nearly 3k alleged data breaches has appeared with a bunch of data already proven legitimate from previous incidents, but also tens of millions of addresses that haven't been seen in HIBP before. Those 80M records are now searchable, read on for the full story:
It's fascinating to see how creative people can get with breached data. Of course there's all the nasty stuff (phishing, identity theft, spam), but there are also some amazingly positive uses for data illegally taken from someone else's system. When I first built Have I Been Pwned
I have a vehement dislike for misleading advertising. We see it every day; weight loss pills, make money fast schemes and if you travel in the same circles I do, claims that extended validation (EV) certificates actually do something useful: > Why are you still claiming this @digicert [https://twitter.com/
Many people will disagree with this post, not so much because it's flat out wrong but because there are so many different approaches one can take. It's a very subjective realm but I'm going to put forward some suggestions, make some considered arguments and leave it at
Back in August, I pushed out a service as part of Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) to help organisations block bad passwords from their online things. I called it "Pwned Passwords" and released 320M of them from real-world data breaches [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-306-
That's it - I'm calling it - extended validation certificates are dead. Sure, you can still buy them (and there are companies out there that would just love to sell them to you!), but their usefulness has now descended from "barely there" to "as good as non-existent". This change
Let me make it crystal clear in the opening paragraph: this incident is not about any sort of security vulnerability on GitHub's behalf, rather it relates to a trove of data from their site which was inappropriately scraped and then inadvertently exposed due to a vulnerability in another service.
Allow me to be controversial for a moment: arbitrary password restrictions on banks such as short max lengths and disallowed characters don't matter. Also, allow me to argue with myself for a moment: banks shouldn't have these restrictions in place anyway. I want to put forward cases for
So the Sony saga continues. As if the whole thing about 77 million breached PlayStation Network accounts [http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/games/playstation-privacy-breach-77-million-customer-accounts-exposed-20110427-1dvhf.html] wasn’t bad enough, numerous other security breaches…
Do you ever hear those stories from your parents along the lines of "when I was young..." and then there's a tale of how risky life was back then compared to today. You know, stuff like having to walk themselves to school without adult supervision, crazy stuff like that
A few months back I got a call one evening which was clearly a virus call centre scam; you know, the ones that call you out of the blue, tell you your PC is infected with all sorts of nasties and offer to fix it for you? Or maybe you
We all jumped on "the Equifax dumpster fire bandwagon" recently and pointed to all the things that went fundamentally wrong with their disclosure process. But it's equally important that we acknowledge exemplary handling of data breaches when they occur because that's behaviour that should be encouraged. Last week,
It seems that there is no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to working around limitations within one's environment. For example, imagine you genuinely wanted to run a device requiring mains power in the centre of your inflatable pool - you're flat out of luck, right? Wrong! Or
> Patience. Frugality. Sacrifice. When you boil it down, what do those three things have in common? Those are choices. Money is not peace of mind. Money’s not happiness. Money is, at its essence, that measure of a man’s choices. This is part of the opening monologue of the
I'll start this post where I start many of my talks - what does a hacker look like? Or perhaps more specifically, what do people think a hacker looks like? It's probably a scary image, one that's a bit mysterious, a shady character lurking in the hidden depths
My Pluralsight courses get pirated all the time. I used to have Google alerts for them but frankly, the flood of emails I’d get each day just didn’t justify the “return” I’d get by forwarding them on to the Pluralsight piracy folks. I ended up rationalising it
In the beginning, there was the web and you accessed it though the browser and all was good. Stuff didn’t download until you clicked on something; you expected cookies to be tracking you and you always knew if HTTPS was being used. In general, the casual observer had a
I get a lot of requests from people for data from Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) that they can analyse. Now obviously, there are a bunch of people up to no good requesting the data but equally, there are many others who just want to run statistics.
The short version: I'm loading over 1 billion breached accounts into HIBP. These are from 2 different "combo lists", collections of email addresses and passwords from all sorts of different locations. I've verified their accuracy (including my own record in one of them) and many hundreds of millions
Almost one year ago now, I declared extended validation certificates dead [https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-dead/]. The entity name had just been removed from Safari on iOS, it was about to be removed from Safari on Mojave and there were indications that Chrome would remove it