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Safe, Secure, Anonymous, and Other Misleading Claims
Imagine you wanted to buy some shit on the internet. Not the metaphorical kind in terms of “I bought some random shit online”, but literal shit. Turds. Faeces. The kind of thing you never would have thought possible to buy online until… Shitexpress came along. Here’s a service that enables you to send an actual…
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How Spoutible’s Leaky API Spurted out a Deluge of Personal Data
Ever hear one of those stories where as it unravels, you lean in ever closer and mutter “No way! No way! NO WAY!” This one, as far as infosec stories go, had me leaning and muttering like never before. Here goes: Last week, someone reached out to me with what they claimed was a Spoutible…
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Inside the Massive Alleged AT&T Data Breach
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 for more.) But sometimes,…
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Down the Cloudflare / Stripe / OWASP Rabbit Hole: A Tale of 6 Rabbits Deep 🐰 🐰 🐰 🐰 🐰 🐰
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”. It’s a tale of firewalls, APIs…
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Join my Twitter Subscription for the Inside Word on Data Breaches
I want to try something new here – bear with me here: Data breach processing is hard and the hardest part of all is getting in touch with organisations and disclosing the incident before I load anything into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). It’s also something I do almost entirely in isolation, sitting here on…
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How Everything We’re Told About Website Identity Assurance is Wrong
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? This is extremely misleading, anyone feel like reporting…
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Breach Disclosure Blow-by-Blow: Here’s Why It’s so Hard
For many years now, I’ve lamented about how much of my time is spent attempting to disclose data breaches to impacted companies. It’s by far the single most time-consuming activity in processing breaches for Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and frankly, it’s about the most thankless task I can imagine. Finding contact details is hard.…
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You Don’t Need to Burn off Your Fingertips (and Other Biometric Authentication Myths)
111 years ago almost to the day, a murder was committed which ultimately led to the first criminal trial to use fingerprints as evidence. We’ve all since watched enough crime shows to understand that fingerprints are unique personal biometric attributes and to date, no two people have ever been found to have a matching set.…
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Beg Bounties
When someone passed me hundreds of thousands of records on kids taken from CloudPets a few years ago, I had a nightmare of a time getting in touch with the company. They’d left a MongoDB instance exposed to the public without a password and someone had snagged all their data. Within the data were references…
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Hello CISO – Brought to You in Collaboration with 1Password
Today I’m really excited to announce a big piece of work 1Password and I have been focusing on this year, a totally free video series called “Hello CISO”. This is a multi-part series that launched with part 1 and when I say “free”, I don’t mean “give us your personal data so we can market…