News · Troy Hunt
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 527: Cybergeddon News v. Reality
As the news from last week has settled down, it would seem this headline was pretty spot on. The foretold apocalypse didn't eventuate, and there were no internet-destroying outages. In fact, it took days before I could find a single story of PHP2Shell being reliably attributed back to a breach. And I don't think we can say the relatively benign outcome was only achieved because we did take it so seriously either; there's a massive trove of sites out there that have been left to rot and would have every opportunity to be pwned by a bug of this magnitude that was readily exploitable, yet here w…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 526: Building HIBP AI/SI First
I have this sense that we've passed the point where "vibe coding" is a derogatory term. I have no empirical evidence for this; it's more a feeling that those weaponising the term have now accepted the inevitability and are just getting with the program. Or they've reskilled into other industries because, let's face it: you can't be a productive, competitive developer today without AI. I saw this comment from Linus Torvalds today which I thought really nailed it: ‼️ Linus Torvalds called rules against AI coding tools "UTTERLY STUPID" on the Linux kernel mailing list. He says people he respects…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 525: AI Data Breach Hyperbole
I remember the name of that AI doco now - The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. I was watching it on the long-haul flight home the other day, and what I found particularly engrossing was the polar-opposite opinions from a bunch of people: "it's gonna kill us all" versus "it's gonna make us all rich", and so on. But to some extent, I can understand the gap between opinions when we're all just speculating about the future. I have much less understanding for why people infatuate with hyping AI as a data breach monster when the evidence to date is quite the opposite. In fact, I've enjoye…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 524: Live From Copenhagen
I'm in Denmark! Well, just, I'm now at Copenhagen airport ready to begin the long trek home, with the final event at GOTO now done and going just perfectly. This week, there are two ShinyHunters arrests in the news: Pepijn in the Netherlands and then Saif in Jordon. It's an inevitable outcome, of course, and as I say this week, it was also the most likely one. Time will tell how many more join their ranks, but the seriousness of the crimes, the length of time they were perpetrated over, and the motivations behind them will certainly see substantial custodial sentences. In other news, this wee…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 523: Live From a Norwegian Fjord
How's that view?! With NDC Oslo now done, it's a little bit of sightseeing before heading to Denmark for GOTO in Copenhagen for Scott's and my "Cyber-broken" talk. In the meantime, this week is mostly about the ShinyHunters trajectory targeting both Cl0p and the FBI, which does feel a little like a crescendo in their activities. Time will tell, but poking the feds in this way doesn't seem great for your longevity. In my disorganised travel state, I also forgot to touch on a brand new sponsor for this week and the weeks to come: Origin. They build tooling to monitor what your AI agents are doi…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 522: Live From Oslo with Scott Helme
Heads up: the first 7 mins is a bit quiet until we worked out the external mic was misbehaving - sorry! But get through that and have a listen to Scott's experiences with how Report URI is identifying malware-infected machines within orgs, all due to CSP reporting. It's a super cool use of the technology, and I'm sure there's an awesome potential for it that neither of us has really thought about yet. Plus, the crazy rate of malicious browser extensions he's picking up with help from "Rory", his local OpenClaw instance.
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 521: Breach Perception v. Reality
I think what really resonates with me this week is being able to completely turn the tables on perceptions around things like AI being the big bad hacking tool the news would have you believe. There's the stat I talk about where it's had literally 0% impact on insurance payouts, the Dutch bloke who's now being tracked down based on his voice and Scott's MAG breach teardown that ultimately pointed to exposed keys rather than anything sophisticated. Then the mention in there about the Aussie headline where ChatGPT has hacked a court system down here when, in fact, a bloke used it to write a scr…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 520: The Unscripted Edition
I've started playing around with YouTube's "create video thumbnail", which hopefully will give me back a bit of time in my day (it used to be a manual job in Photoshop) and be a bit more interesting. And on that note, the imagery it's chosen this week is spot on: that Lockwood ES2100 electric strike looks like the perfect solution for my first fully installed Ubiquiti Access door lock. Having the door position sensor built in really simplifies things, and hopefully Ubiquiti will later add support to their hubs for the latch position and strike lock status. Once I'm back from this next round o…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 519: Breaches & Data Integrity
It does feel like I've bitten off too much and am now chewing like crazy this week. The 3D printing talk with Elle in Oslo, the "normal" NDC infosec talk, the cyber-broken talk with Scott in Copenhagen and then those ratbag hackers keep dumping more data too! Oh, and still finalising all the IoT door lock stuff, along with mapping out all the cameras, APs and door hubs in Ubiquiti's designer to make sure we don't miss anything there. It's ordered chaos... just.
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Troy Hunt
A Cautionary Tale About Data Breach Claims, Verification and Carhartt
You're not going to believe this, but turns out you can't always take criminals at their word. Actually, I'll walk that back a bit as it may not even be the cybercrime guys who got this wrong, but it all starts here: 🚨Cyber Alert ‼️ 🇺🇸US - 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘁 ShinyHunters hacking group claims to have compromised Carhartt and allegedly stolen more than 50 GB of compressed data containing millions of customer records, employee information, customer metadata, loyalty-related information, and… pic.twitter.com/BvzsEQS54l— Hackmanac (@H4ckmanac) August 13, 2026 My usual Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) wor…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 518: IoT Doorlock Nirvana with UniFi
I genuinely think I've nailed the IoT door lock situation! Well, Ubiquiti has, but I think I've worked out how to put it all into a residential house and have it make sense. There are a few basic tenets: Main power (never have to rely on batteries) Fail-secure (needs to remain locked on power outage) Local control (no cloud latency to contend with) Manual override ("the house is on fire, let me out") Which is exactly what we have here in this week's vid (and sorry about the section of rubbish audio; the camera mic started capturing it for a short period there). There are some edge cases I wan…
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Troy Hunt
Welcoming the Sri Lankan Government to Have I Been Pwned
Today, we welcome the 48th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka CERT now has access to monitor Sri Lankan government domains against the data in HIBP, helping identify exposed government accounts and respond when they appear in new data breaches. As with the other governments already using the service, this is about using breach data for good: giving national cyber teams practical visibility into their public sector exposure and supporting their work to protect government services.
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 517: Cyber Ransoms
The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without getting caught and the companies they breach rapidly get piled onto by class action lawyers that keeps them busy fighting and being cautious not to say anyting to customers lest that then gets used against them in litigation. That's mostly it; more in this week's video:
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 516: Live From Vietnam
A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to actually answer most of the questions?! Being conscious that they're the target of criminal extortion and are genuinely the victims here, I still struggle to grasp how simple incident response questions can be so lawyer-speaked as to remove all sensible meaning from the responses. But this is how these things tend to play out these days (speaki…
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Troy Hunt
Welcoming the Nepalese Government to Have I Been Pwned
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 quickly when those accounts appear in a new data breach. This is precisely what the HIBP government service was built for: helping national cyber teams strengthen threat monitoring and incident response capabilities by providing visibility into compromised credentials and breached accou…
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Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 515: Seeking Caffeine Utopia
Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy, no, it's just not the same. It's not the same ubiquity of high-quality coffee shops and passion for what many view as the art of making espresso-based drinks. There's comparably little tolerance for the likes of Starbucks (who have not fared well in Australia), and other mass-produced forms of the drink (I don't think I've ever seen diner-style filter coffee here). All that sa…
