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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 for the masses and link out to more detailed material for those who want to go deeper. Let's start with the raw numbers because that's th

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 has come via a combination of factors including increasing use of mobile devices, removal of the EV visual indicator by

It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point", that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass and as I said at the time, "will very shortly become the norm". Since that time, the percentage of web pages loaded over a secure connection has rocketed from 52% to 71% whilst the proportion of the world's top 1 million websites redirecting people to HTTPS has go

Pretty much every day, I get a reminder from someone about how little people know about their exposure in data breaches. Often, it's after someone has searched Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and found themselves pwned somewhere or other. Frequently, it's some long-forgotten site they haven't even thought about in years and also frequently, the first people know of these incidents is via HIBP: large @tic

I've Just Launched "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords for Download Last August, I launched a little feature within Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) I called Pwned Passwords. This was a list of 320 million passwords from a range of different data breaches which organisations could use to better protect their own systems. How? NIST explains: When processing requests to establish and change m

The JavaScript Supply Chain Paradox: SRI, CSP and Trust in Third Party Libraries A couple of years back as the US presidential campaign was ramping up, the Trump camp did something stupid. I know, we're all shocked but bear with me because it's an important part of the narrative of this post. One of their developers embedded this code in the campaign's donation website: <script src="https://github

I Now Own the Coinhive Domain. Here's How I'm Fighting Cryptojacking and Doing Good Things with Content Security Policies. 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 interested in reading about

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 in favour of the k-anonymity model launched with V2. Last week I wrote about Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era with the aim of helping those building services which require authenti

Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era In the beginning, things were simple: you had two strings (a username and a password) and if someone knew both of them, they could log in. Easy. But the ecosystem in which they were used was simple too, for example in MIT's Time-Sharing Computer, considered to be the first computer system to use passwords: We're talking back in the 60's

Reckon you've seen some stupid security things? Here, hold my beer... My mate Lars Klint shared this tweet the other day: Your password is not unique. pic.twitter.com/ga4GwxtzrQ — Lars Klint (@larsklint) April 16, 2017 Naturally, I passed it on because let's face it, that's some crazy shit going on right there. To which the Twitters responded with equal parts abject horror and berating comments fo

Data from connected CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids' voice messages Only a couple of weeks ago, there were a lot of news headlines about how Germany had banned an internet-connected doll called "Cayla" over fears hackers could target children. One of their primary concerns was the potential risk to the privacy of children: conversations between the child and others can be

8 million GitHub profiles were leaked from GeekedIn's MongoDB - here's how to see yours 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. My data. Proba

Offshoring roulette: lessons from outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines 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 outsourcing vendors across Asia. Whilst the former hesitati

Earlier today, Motherboard reported on what had been rumoured for some time, namely that Dropbox had been hacked. Not just a little bit hacked and not in that "someone has cobbled together a list of credentials that work on Dropbox" hacked either, but proper hacked to the tune of 68 million records. Very shortly after, a supporter of Have I been pwned (HIBP) sent over the data which once unzipped,

Last week there was no escaping news of the latest data breach. The LinkedIn hack of 2012 which we thought had "only" exposed 6.5M password hashes (not even the associated email addresses so in practice, useless data), was now being sold on the dark web. It was allegedly 167 million accounts and for a mere 5 bitcoins (about US$2.2k) you could jump over to the Tor-based trading site, pay your Bitco

Controlling vehicle features of Nissan LEAFs across the globe via vulnerable APIs Last month I was over in Norway doing training for ProgramUtvikling, the good folks who run the NDC conferences I've become so attached to. I was running my usual “Hack Yourself First” workshop which is targeted at software developers who’d like to get up to speed on the things they should be doing to protect their a

Remember Heartbleed? If you believe the hype today, Shellshock is in that league and with an equally awesome name albeit bereft of a cool logo (someone in the marketing department of these vulns needs to get on that). But in all seriousness, it does have the potential to be a biggie and as I did with Heartbleed, I wanted to put together something definitive both for me to get to grips with the sit

Your API versioning is wrong, which is why I decided to do it 3 different wrong ways In the end, I decided the fairest, most balanced way was to piss everyone off equally. Of course I’m talking about API versioning and not since the great “tabs versus spaces” debate have I seen so many strong beliefs in entirely different camps. Imagine this: HTTP GET: https://haveibeenpwned.com/api/breachedaccoun

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 discrimination is frequently the product of ignorance; people often don’t understand the

Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature Recently I’ve had a couple of opportunities to think again about how a secure password reset function should operate, firstly whilst building this functionality into ASafaWeb and secondly when giving some direction for someone else doing a similar thing. In that second instance, I wanted to point them to a canonical

Another week, another breach. This time Yahoo! was the target with 453,491 email addresses and passwords from their Voices service being exposed for all to see. Whilst unfortunate for those involved, these breaches do give us some unique insight into password practices and as is usually the case, it’s not pretty. Back in June last year after one of many Sony breaches I conducted a brief analysis a

It’s about assurance. It’s about establishing a degree of trust in a site’s legitimacy that’s sufficient for you to confidently transmit and receive data with the knowledge that it’s reaching its intended destination without being intercepted or manipulated in the process. Last week I wrote a (slightly) tongue-in-cheek post about the Who’s who of bad password practices. I was critical of a number