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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Let's start with a quick quiz: Take a look at haveibeenpwned.com [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and tell me where the traffic is encrypted between: You see HTTPS which is good so you know it's doing crypto things in your browser, but where's the other end of
No matter how much anyone tries to sugar coat it, a service like Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) which deals with billions of records hacked out of other peoples' systems is always going to sit in a grey area. There are degrees, of course; at one end
There's a "hidden" API on HIBP. Well, it's not "hidden" insofar as it's easily discoverable if you watch the network traffic from the client, but it's not meant to be called directly, rather only via the web app. It's called "unified search" and it looks
Last month I was over in Norway doing training for ProgramUtvikling, [http://programutvikling.no/] the good folks who run the NDC conferences I've become so attached to. I was running my usual “Hack Yourself First” workshop [https://www.troyhunt.com/2016/02/more-europe-even-more-again-and-more.
HTTPS or SSL or TLS or whatever you want to call it can be a confusing beast. Some say it’s just about protecting your password and banking info whilst the packets are flying around the web but I’ve long said that SSL is not about encryption [https://www.
Let me start with this headline [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-passwords-idUSKCN0XV1I6]: Other headlines went on to suggest that you need to change your password right now [http://www.iflscience.com/technology/millions-passwords-hotmail-gmail-and-yahoo-have-been-stolen] if you're using the likes
That's it - I'm calling it - HTTPS adoption has now reached the moment of critical mass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point] where it's gathering enough momentum that it will very shortly become "the norm" rather than the exception it so frequently was in the past.
A couple of months ago, I launched version 2 of Pwned Passwords [https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/]. This is a collection of over half a billion passwords which have previously appeared in data breaches and the intention is that they're used as a
If you've landed on this page because you saw a strange message on a completely different website then followed a link to here, drop a note to the site owner and let them know what happened. If, on the other hand, you're on this page because you're
Who wants free stuff? C’mon, everybody wants a free lunch, right? Yes, yes they do and that’s precisely the trigger used in scams like this one. Recently I wrote about the mechanics of another Facebook scam [https://www.troyhunt.com/2012/10/she-did-what-in-school-mechanics-
Over the weekend, a Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) subscriber contacted me after they found their Spotify credentials online. It turns out that this particular woman went searching for her specific password after finding "some guy listening to Mexican music from a foreign device on my acct"
You know when you're really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That's me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported
The tech news recently has seen quite a lot of chatter about an alleged haul of Apple credentials [http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-icloud-ransom-what-you-need-to-know/], apparently about 250 million of them in all. Allegedly. Maybe. Or was it 300 million? [https://www.macrumors.com/
I love a good XKCD comic; Randall Munroe has a unique way of cutting right to the crux of technology issues and always doing it in a humorous fashion. Little Bobby Tables [http://xkcd.com/327/] remains an all-time classic and it’s amazing how many times you’ll
Spoiler: I have data from the story in the title of this post, it's mostly what I expected it to be, I've just added it to HIBP where I've called it "Data Troll", and I'm going to give everyone a lot more context below. Here goes:
I heard about this guy, walked into a federal bank with a portable phone, handed the phone to the teller, the guy on the other end of the phone said: “We got this guy’s little girl, and if you don’t give him all your money, we’re gonna
My son turned 7 earlier this month. I've been getting him into coding [https://www.troyhunt.com/kids-and-code-simple-programming-on/] and teaching him the fundamentals of using a PC which I reckon is a pretty essential life skill these days. Part of that is helping him
I have lots of little ideas for various pet projects, most of which go nowhere ( Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] being the exception), so I'm always looking for the fastest, cheapest way to get up and running. Last month as part of my blog post on How
111 years ago almost to the day, a murder was committed which ultimately led to the first criminal trial to use fingerprints as evidence [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-case-where-fingerprints-were-used-evidence-180970883/] . We've all since watched enough crime shows to understand that fingerprints are
A quick summary first before the details: This week, the FBI in cooperation with international law enforcement partners took down a notorious marketplace trading in stolen identity data in an effort they've named "Operation Cookie Monster". They've provided millions of impacted email addresses and passwords to Have I
Adobe had a little issue the other day with the small matter of 150 million accounts being breached and released to the public. Whoops. So what are we talking about? A shed load of records containing an internal ID, username, email, encrypted password and a password hint. Naked Security did