Category: Weekly update

I’m back in Oslo! Writing this the day after recording, it feels like I couldn’t be further from Dubai; the temperature starts with a minus, it’s snowing and there’s not a supercar in sight. Back on business, this week I’m talking about the challenge of loading breaches and managing costs. A breach load immediately takes…

Read more →

A super quick intro today as I rush off to do the next very Dubai thing: drive a Lambo through the desert to go dirt bike riding before jumping in a Can-Am off-roader and then heading to the kart track for a couple of afternoon sessions. I post lots of pics to my Facebook account,…

Read more →

I wouldn’t say this is a list of my favourite breaches from this year as that’s a bit of a disingenuous term, but oh boy were there some memorable ones. So many of the incidents I deal with are relatively benign in terms of either the data they expose or the nature of the service,…

Read more →

I was going to write about how much I’ve enjoyed “tinkering” with the HIBP API, but somehow, that term doesn’t really seem appropriate any more for a service of this scale. On the contrary, we’re putting in huge amounts of effort to get this thing fast, stable, and sustainable. We could do the first two…

Read more →

I have absolutely no problem at all talking about the code I’ve screwed up. Perhaps that’s partly because after 3 decades of writing software (and doing some meaningful stuff along the way), I’m not particularly concerned about showing my weaknesses. And this week, I screwed up a bunch of stuff; database queries that weren’t resilient…

Read more →

This was a much longer than usual update, largely due to the amount of time spent discussing the Earth 2 incident. As I said in the video (many times!), the amount of attention this has garnered from both Earth 2 users and the company itself is incommensurate with the impact of the incident itself. It’s…

Read more →

I have really clear memories of listening to the Stack Overflow podcast in the late 2000’s and hearing Jeff and Joel talk about the various challenges they were facing and the things they did to overcome them. I just suddenly thought of that when realising how long this week’s video went for with no real…

Read more →

Firstly, my apologies for the minute and a bit of echo at the start of this video, OBS had somehow magically decided to start recording both the primary mic and the one built into my camera. Easy fix, moving on… During the livestream, I was perplexed as to why the HIBP DB was suddenly maxing…

Read more →

Apparently, Stefan and I trying to work stuff out in real time about how to build more efficient features in HIBP is entertaining watching! If I was to guess, I think it’s just seeing people work through the logic of how things work and how we might be able to approach things differently, and doing…

Read more →

It wasn’t easy talking about the Muah.AI data breach. It’s not just the rampant child sexual abuse material throughout the system (or at least requests for the AI to generate images of it), it’s the reactions of people to it. The tweets justifying it on the basis of there being noo “actual” abuse, the characterisation…

Read more →

Ok, the scenery here is amazing, but the real story is data breach victim notification. Charlotte and I wanted to do this one together today and chat about some of the things we’d been hearing from government and law enforcement on our travels, and the victim notification angle featured heavily. She reminded me of the…

Read more →

It’s not a green screen! It’s just a weird a weird hotel room in Pittsburgh, but it did make for a cool backdrop for this week’s video. We were there visiting our FBI friends after coming from Washington DC and a visit to CISA, the “America’s Cyber Defence Agency”. This week, I’m talking about those…

Read more →