The Changing World of Data Breaches with Troy Hunt

13-12-2023 • 52 mins

Everyone who’s on the internet is exposed to risk. Every time you set up a new account or app, you create another place where your data can be hacked or breached. This makes your differing passwords crucial.

Today’s guest is Troy Hunt. Troy is a Pluralsight author and instructor, Microsoft Regional Director, and Most Valued Professional specializing in online security and cloud development. He is a conference speaker and runs workshops on how to build more secure software with organizations. He is also the creator of the popular data breach aggregation service known as Have I Been Pwned.

Show Notes:

[1:26] - Troy shares what he currently does and the work he is known for.
[2:57] - You can put your data in one place and it can traverse the internet and end up in places you don’t expect.
[6:54] - There’s a challenge in running a site that has millions of queries at any time.
[9:25] - Troy shares some of the accomplishments of Have I Been Pwned.
[13:32] - Does he experience a lot of malicious traffic? He used to. Troy explains how he has managed this.
[18:14] - Have I Been Pwned has been around for a while and began as a lot of manual labor for Troy.
[23:10] - It is crucial for organizations to be receptive to security reports.
[25:09] - In a lot of ransoms, data of specific groups of people are used as threats.
[27:56] - Troy lists some of the things that happen on the back end of running a site like Have I Been Pwned.
[30:36] - Cloud services have been an amazing advancement in technology, but they open up more points of entry.
[33:35] - There is a hierarchy of multi-factor authentication. Troy discusses the current strategies that are best practice.
[35:45] - For users, what is the second-factor authentication you can manage to use?
[37:27] - There are different risk levels to different things. What do you actually need to carefully protect and what level of inconvenience are you willing to bear?
[39:59] - Troy shares how his parents have been impacted by confusing technology. What is the right technology for a demographic?
[43:15] - Some data is more important than other pieces of information.
[45:33] - Some data is also more or less important to different individuals.
[46:54] - For those managing and discussing data breaches, we also need to be aware that there are pieces of data that could be important to someone but isn’t important to others.
[48:24] - Unfortunately, data breaches haven’t gotten less common and aren’t really getting better.