Not too far in the past, when Bootstrapped themes were becoming the face of the Internet, a new framework came to town — TailwindCSS. The smart thing they did was introduced the framework with a few brilliant template and a lot of styled components. I bought the initial copy and does a lot of people. Those templates, TailwindUI.com (now TailwindCSS.com/plus)[1] became the gradien-y, dark-ish, glow-y design you see a lot these days.
A similar design wave is also happening with internal dashboard, admin interfaces. Thanks to https://ui.shadcn.com Personally, I'm fine with the standardization of such functional interface designs.
btw, for Have I Been Pwned, this is Bootstrap[2] and I'm not surprised it is also inheriting those design styles.
It shows you a vertically scrolling timeline (with logos and blurbs) of all the data breaches that have exposed your email. How delightfully horrifying.
Why not just use different passwords for different things. I'd recommend something like privacy.com so you can generate a bunch of one-use cc cards when doing shopping on sites you don't trust and the like.
Also don't willingly give up valuable personal information unless it's absolutely necessary, it's also not illegal to give online services outright false information (incorrect birthdates for example) which, in the event of a future data breach of that service, now at least those who would plan to benefit from your personal information might have some difficulties resetting important accs and the like.
You just gotta be smart, it's not about being powerless, HIBP and the service is just one tool to make you aware of what's out there before it gets used against you. (I would highly recommend setting up notifications for important e-mail addresses)
Application specific credit card numbers really needs to be a legally required thing.
My card has been skimmed a couple of times and by far the most annoying part of the experience is having to reset and update regular accounts with the new number.
Of course for online purchases the whole flow here should be inverted: businesses should just be registering against my payment provider directly, no account numbers involved (under the hood maybe have it be managed by ED25519 public keys for identity?)
EDIT: while we're at it, why even have persistent numbers for in person cards? Let me tap it against my phone, invalidate the stored key from that time on, and generate a new one.
> Application specific credit card numbers really needs to be a legally required thing.
My latest card (debit) one has a feature I've not seen elsewhere, but I think kind of solves that too. It has a new CVC number every 10 minutes, which I kind of both hate and love. Love it for the obvious reasons of "not even having the physical card lets you use it digitally" but also because I cannot have it 100% in my password manager, I have to use the banking app to get the latest CVC code when I need it.
I’ve want a physical one of these that changes both the CVC and the entire 16-digit number. Heck let the name submitted with the number be a longer checksum that can be verified at point of sale to figure out who’s actual account it is.
Plus then my gibberish name on my card number will match the gibberish secret question answers.
> Heck let the name submitted with the number be a longer checksum that can be verified at point of sale to figure out who’s actual account it is.
That's going to be one hell of a lot of an issue in practice. Hotels, car rentals and AFAIK even some airlines want that the name of the card holder matches the name on the ID card.
Wish it was so easy, some websites have decided they like lower security, especially for some reason, my banks. Banc Sabadell in Spain for example, only does 2FA via SMS (famously insecure) and your password is limited to 6 numbers, and accepts nothing else.
This thread isn't about data in general, only passwords. So first of all, a strong password is much harder to crack in the instance that it's stored in a hashed form in the database. In the instance it's stored (unforgivably) in cleartext, it cannot be used, because an additional factor is required to authenticate. That is how exactly.
Not only is not in order, I tried a few emails and in all of them I get a bunch of sites that I've never used. I wonder if it's fetching the wrong data?
I regularly have doppelgangers that sign up for services with my email address.
I've been added to door/visitor notifications. I have received medical information for them. Retirement package info. A telecom internal tracker. A Doubleclick account for a while. Lessons for their children. Countless rewards accounts.
I also checked my throwaway gmail and it was included in a French Citizen leak [1]. I'm neither French, nor do I have any other connection to France. Not sure why my email would be included there, except for some random using my email (or misspelling theirs) – it's [5-7 letter english word][number] at gmail.
Amazing that even within the last decade a site as large as LinkedIn could be storing unsalted passwords. How does anyone fail at this in the modern era?
Most probably some ancient legacy mainframe or whatnot other integration that nobody really has the time and budget to clean up and migrate to something more modern.
The larger the company, the larger the risk for ossification of anything deemed "business critical" because even a minuscule outage of one hour now is six if not seven figures worth of "lost" time.
LinkedIn isn't old enough to have anything ancient. It was launched in 2003, and even then you'd get laughed at for suggesting storing passwords in plaintext.
Doesn't mean that the infra is still ancient. What I see a lot is tech debt from migrations. Lots of times both the old and new systems have to work together for a period of time, so you leave certain legacy protocols and flags in place for the transition period and then the new system is never fully "updated" to the new standards. Pre win2k AD, file path lengths, encryption protocols, etc etc. Sure, the new system is "up to date" but the old compatibility settings remain.
For all the talk of AI Slop, I don’t hear much about the fact that we have been suffering from Outsourced Slop for decades now. I suspect that is how this kind of thing also fail at LinkedIn. I say that based on my experience dealing with outsourcing companies and the product they produce through outsourced programmers.
It’s really just been a similar problem as with AI code, that without strong and competent management that can set intelligent expectations and requirements and test for them, you will surely get what appears to all the business and leadership types like an equivalent product, without any sense that it’s slop underneath the surface.
I'm on board with the cheap offshore and bad incentives motiv, but feel this has to be augmented with a mention of the senior cowboy coder (who just went into retirement). Most likely in the future these stereotypes will be joined by vibe coders and AI-powered juniors, but as someone working this industry for a couple of decades give or take - we've learned how to deal with these by now.
I've seen coworkers at Big Tech Co™ make huge security blunders despite attending prestigious universities (Berkeley, Stanford, etc) and having 5+ years of industry experience. No LLM slop required. Just rushing to meet deadlines while requirements shift rapidly enough that details get overlooked.
It's actually really easy to do unintentionally. For an intervening middleware, a password field in a JSON object is just like any other field in a JSON object.
You may have some kind of logging / tracking / analytics somewhere that logs request bodies. You don't even have to engage in marketing shenanigans for that to be a problem, an abuse prevention system (which is definitely a necessity at their scale) is enough.
Storing unsalted passwords in the "passwords database" is uncommon. Storing request logs from e.g. the Android app's API gateway, and forgetting to mark the `password` field in the forgot password flow as sensitive? Not so uncommon.
A company as big as LinkedIn should have bots continually accessing their site with unique generated passwords etc., and then be searching for those secrets in logging pipelines, bytes on disk, etc. to see where they get leaked. I know much smaller companies that do this.
Yes, it's easy to fuck up. But a responsible company implements mitigations. And LinkedIn can absolutely afford to do much more.
I think the new approach is to "hire" LLM agents to do the job, unless the hiring manager can prove they exhausted all ways an LLM could possibly have done the task.
I always picture a random middle manager in $large_organisation being told about something like this, and then they work out the angles and try to find the benefit.
If the method works, and it shows that the logging feature Fred got so much credit for is storing passwords, what are the political implications of that? Can our intrepid middle manager steal some of Fred's glory? Or is Fred an ally and it should be carefully handled? Or do they sit on it and wait until an opportune moment to destroy Fred?
This is the kind of reasoning process I think goes on, because I've seen very few large organisations make actually-good technical decisions.
The fact that you think random middle managers are all that psychopathic really says more about you than it does some hypothetical middle manager.
Are their psychopaths and Machiavellian schemers in management? Certainly. Are they the majority? Almost certainly not, unless you're working for absolutely the wrong company.
As the Brits would say, "cock-up before conspiracy."
No. It may not be conscious Machiavellian scheme, but it's a common attitude among middle managers. They are extremely sensitive to their reputation, which is why they punish people who make them look bad, even if it's something good for the company. Finding security vulnerabilities or wasted resources is met with an ambiguous hostility.
And unfortunately, a lot of people aren't emotionally intelligent enough to recognize that many managers use emotional reactions to redirect the room away from them. Because if you're the angry one, people won't ask questions like "didn't someone mention the possibility of this to you 6 months ago?"
Everyone is extremely sensitive to their reputation. That is just human nature. Someone who can't factor that into their actions and communications is frankly lacking basic social skills.
> Everyone is extremely sensitive to their reputation. That is just human nature
I don't really agree with that, but let's say I do. Middle management is a unique position where their sensitivity is a bigger liability to everyone else. They have some power, but not a lot. They ironically have higher visibility in the company than upper management. And the job requires 0 technical understanding of what they manage.
So that puts them in an awkward position that is often abused. If they feel someone is going to get in trouble, they will make sure that's not them, which is a terribly common instinct. When a developer tells the company there is a problem to address that could threaten the product, that's a good thing that should be welcomed. Instead, many middle managers see that developer as the problem.
> Someone who can't factor that into their actions and communications is frankly lacking basic social skills.
Such bots can certainly solve part of the problem, but they can't fix the issue entirely.
If your logging is on an obscure enough endpoint (password reset flow in the Android app's API gateway), you may forget to add that endpoint to the bot, just like you may forget to mark it as sensitive in your logging system.
At this scale, the developers working on these esoteric endpoints might not even be aware that such a bot exists.
Would this be solved by providing the client with a (frequently rotated) public key to encrypt the password field specifically before submitting to the server, so that the only place it can be decrypted and stored is the authentication service at the very end of its journey through the network?
A new public key per password-mutating session is quite an interesting idea.
It does have some challenges in introducing a read-before-write to fetch the session key at the start of the session, but given the relatively low call volume of such flows that might be a small price to pay to simplify security audits and de-risk changes to any service in the call chain.
Unfortunately my understanding is that it’s trivial to implement unsoundly but it’s also not something for which there are an abundance of good implementations across languages.
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked though so maybe there is a newer, less radioactive approach. But yes, never actually sending the authenticator itself (and doing so in a way that the proof is valid only once) would stop this sort of thing cold.
LinkedIn at one point were continually pressuring people into handing over their email credentials in the name of making it easy to find your contacts.
So yeah, LinkedIn have never been exactly a bastion of IT Security.
No user ever had a real use case for seeing a button that says "invite X" that doesn't send an invite on the platform, but instead sends an email to X who doesn't have a Linkedin account.
And if you decline, it asks you again. Two times using different wording.
You'll be surprised how many features "tech" people think nobody uses (Like a share button on a website), are actually very popular. That's likely the reason that feature still exists as everything is most likely A/B tested to death.
I was not only talking about that though, but also that they can build shadow profiles and recommend people to you that way.
Same company that requires you upload a biometric scan of your face paired with your passport for ""verification"" (despite not needing it on signup) if you want to enable MFA, btw ;-)
On a related note, I no longer have an active linkedin account.
I worked for a company with millions of users that had plaintext passwords in the DB. The login had been rolled from scratch in the days before you could get decent, tested off-the-shelf code for their particular stack. There were always so many fires to put out and projects to keep the wages being paid that it never got looked at. It got bought by Microsoft and eventually they just consumed the whole thing somehow, so it's gone now.
It did allow me to cheekily run a SQL GROUP BY once to see what the most common passwords were, though. Top password was actually "trustno1" IIRC, followed by all the usual suspects, e.g. abcdefg, 12345678 etc. (there were no meaningful password rules)
IIRC linkedin was one of the breaches where I got a spam email to my linkedin address, told them and they were like "can't be us - must be you who has been hacked". And then later "ah yeah was us, but no personal data was stolen". Like email address is not personal - lucky me for having a catch all domain and being able to just block the address I had used with linkedin.
Does anyone else feel like the new design feels less trustworthy? I've probably just been conditioned on too many templates that all look the same, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it, yet it makes me wonder if I've accidentally opened a ripoff instead of the real thing.
No, I agree. This new version looks like someone using a cheap template with cheap gradients (I don’t know how else to describe the gradients), and it immediately makes it look less trustworthy.
Yes. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, but I think website redesigns are just a marketing thing (and fun for web developers) and rarely benefit the user. Nasa ADS has a fantastic (if super old-looking) site for many years that was clean and fast and did the job, they spent a lot of time and effort jazzing it up with pictures and javascript, and now it still just does the same thing.
They could preserve the same basic concept but scrunch it vertically a lot. Right now, the tiles in each column are spaced out so much that if you moved them all into one column, they wouldn't overlap.
Instead, they could stagger them. Some blank space would still make it easier to understand visually, just not as much. If they did this, it would be a bit harder to see how which date-circle on the timeline corresponds to which tile, but that could be fixed somehow, like a dotted line that joins a tile to its circle or by moving the circle to one side of the center line.
They could also shrink the contents of the tiles themselves.
(1) There's no reason to have MORE space after "Compromised data:" than before it. It wastes space, and (IMHO) aesthetically it looks very awkward and clumsy.
(2) Personally, I'd also not double-space the bullet items. I can see how it adds emphasis, but it wastes a lot of space and to me it looks bad.
(3) Too much vertical space above the "View Details" button. Sure, some padding is nice, but why so much more here than between the icon (at the top of the tile) and the first paragraph?
The new design looks great, and I always love following Troy's updates (although sometimes with semi-morbid curiosity).
I do find the timeline to be a little confusing- it seems to be ordered from earliest breach to most recent, but the dates on the timeline don't match that, as they seem to be when the data was leaked?
Display: breach date
Ordering: breach published date?
I think it might be clearer to order + display the published date, and in the cards themselves show the breach date in a standard way.
Small bug report: I've been pwnd a few dozens times, and my timeline is not in calendar order. I see Adobe (October 2013), then LinkedIn (May 2012), then Dropbox (June 2012), then Lastfm (March 2012), then some 2016 ones, then Kickstarter in 2014, and then after that they start being more in order of the listed dates.
He should partner with a law firm, for class action lawsuits, for every breach due to negligence (which is probably all of them).
Tie in to a banking service, so you can do direct deposits to many millions of people, every time there's new settlements paid, and you'll be a folk hero.
Get lawyers who want negligent companies to actually regret the breaches, with judgements that hurt. (Rather than a small settlement that gets lawyers paid, but is only a small cost of doing business, which is preferable to doing business responsibly.)
Optional: Sell data of imminent lawsuits, to an investment firm.
Though, ideally, investors won't need this data, since everyone will know that a breach means a stock should take a hit. Isn't that how it should be.
Probably impossible, but create a slush fund where companies that behave badly are forced to pay into so we can do things like fix roads and build housing.
That sounds like a great slogan, but you really don't want a justice system that's has an additional mandate to collect revenue. It's basically civil forfeiture all over again
It’s a form of regulation. We could also put the sysadmin and the CIO to death every time there is a data breach but we, as a society, have decided that is too extreme. We could also choose to simply wag our fingers and hope the shame they feel will prevent a repeat. Fines seem to strike a balance.
The idea of fines as a revenue stream has never sat well with me. Fines are meant to be a disincentive. The ideal collection amount is zero. Treating them as a revenue stream creates a perverse incentive to enforce the penalty without disincentivizing the behavior.
Just like police departments use asset forfeiture to get money to buy their “toys” while innocent people lose their cash and cars because carrying cash is suspicious.
Maybe a uniform tax credit/refund for each citizen that is covered by that level of government. We the citizens can then decide if we fix the issue or continue to generate fines, but at least the budget isn't expecting revenue that could disappear (like the lack of traffic tickets during the beginning of COVID).
Governments should not operate fiscally like corporations. A financial institution will budget around fees because it's in their benefit for their customers to incur fees. A government should not budget around fines because they want the behavior which was fined to not occur at all.
I think one way to prevent bad incentives is to ensure that the organizational units that create and enforce policies are not the ones that benefit from any fines collected.
How about fines go into a sovereign wealth fund (but not be seen as major source for the fund- more a bonus) so there is no short term budget planning based on fine revenue.
This is literally what happened in Belgium when politicians did budget. A piece of the expected slice was traffic fines.
So that means that any kind of system that would improve traffic other than repressive measures would cost them twice, once to fix the situation and again when they can issue less fines.
If I drive carelessly and get a meaningful fine, I'll think twice next time, irrespective of who gets the money. I only care that I am fined. Unless the police starts to administer fines when they shouldn't, all is good, right? What happened in Belgium?
I don’t know about Belgium specifically, but one of the usual issues is that it incentivises aggressive policing of minor issues that make money (like parking violations), which takes resources out of other problems (like mugging).
In some situations (cough random towns with sections of highway running through them in Texas), it incentivizes an approach to traffic enforcement which is barely distinguishable from getting mugged.
Driving carefully is not a boolean. It's possible to design roads/environments (accidentally or not) in such a way that the “you drove carelessly” metric that triggers the fine statistically applies more often.
Not really. If you hit a person with your car and that person becomes disabled. It will be way more expensive for the govt in the long run compared to a few fines.
That's fine for you personally, and it may sound all good from a logical, theoretical, or academic perspective, however I personally know of people who have lost their license due to multiple fines and "demerit points" (NZ) resulting in that consequence.
The fines, and loss of license hurt them personally, professionally, and financially, but didn't change their behavior outside of the very short term.
In NZ we have people that are in and out of prison due to burglaries, robberies, etc... but the penalties don't change their longer term behavior.
There's a deeper problem, and penalties are important, but not the entire fix.
Then these people _obviously_ are not fit to drive a multi-ton killing machine at all and should have their license permanently revoked, when they had multiple chances for introspection.
The occasional fine I get (and the prospect of getting another) does affect my driving habits and attentiveness, and it's the same for people close to me. Can't talk for others, though I'd expect this to be the norm.
If your ideal is a perfect society where everyone follows the all rules all the time you are going to be sorely disappointed. The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. And that revenue should be strictly used for rehabilitative or restorative justice. For example, speeding fines should go to road improvements that deter speeding making roads safer. If no one’s speeding, there’s no need for that. But people will always break the law.
Yes I agree. I was replying to the suggestion to put the proceeds from fines into a general slush fund. Doing that creates an incentive to use speeding tickets to pay for police overtime and radar guns instead of traffic calming infrastructure.
I just want to say that in modern times safety is put as #1 priority, while it's actually always a balance. E.g. we wanted the safest airline industry, we'd close the airports. But we balance the safety vs usefulness.
> The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense.
I don't think that's a logically self-consistent idea. The "actual occurrence of the offense" is not an inevitable pre-existing fact, it exists downstream of the size of the fine and efficiency of enforcement. If you fine people 5% of their annual income for going 1 mph over the speed limit, and put more traffic enforcement on the road, fewer people are going to speed.
So to answer the question "what's the ideal collection amount", you have to consider what the costs (economic and social) of rule breaking behavior are, and trade those off with how much behavior can be modified by fines, as well as the costs of enforcement.
Furthermore, just taking the statement at face value, the only way to actually collect the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense is to successfully fine 100% of offenders or fine some non-offenders, but even if this is possible it's almost certainly not the "ideal" amount of enforcement.
That says a whole lot all by itself. You acknowledge that reform doesn’t work? There is always money to be made because people don’t like the set of rules set? So when people follow all those rules, make new rules that people will break to keep it going? Where does it stop?
I agree with the overal position. Though I believe optimizing to collect zero fines is a bad measure.
A fine can be a relatively just mechanism to show that actions have consequences. And even the best people will occasionally make honest mistakes, so they will just get a fine instead of being persecuted for minor offences.
If fines degrade to a revenue stream, it's an indication something else is off with the financial structure inside the government. At least around here fines don't go into some official's private accounts, but I can see how they might "help" an underfunded department. Thinking about it this way, maybe we should consider funneling fines into a separate pool of money. Though I am not sure what to do when the fines are used to fix damage caused by the action (e.g. ecological damage). Governing is hard :(
We could instead randomly select representatives instead of using popularity contests where the candidates need money for advertisements in order to get popular, or to just even let people know that they exist.[1]
Getting a company to publicly announce a breach is hard today. Your suggestion would make it even harder, and more data breaches would be kept from the public because of the consequences.
I would rather know that a company messed up and change my password, than not knowing
Only get a couple bucks from these class action lawsuits - give ‘em a 15% discount or something if they own up to it publicly, I don’t mind getting $18 instead of $20
How? Disclosure should already be legally required--class-actions and lawsuits should already be a thing. The Have I Been Pwned data sets aren't volunteered by these companies. It's a catalog of leaked data.
The class-action response of "identity monitoring" is nonsense. More companies, if they can't afford to or don't want secure data, shouldn't collect it or should aggressively purge it. User data should be a liability.
I'm not sure, the effect would be to increase the riskiness of nondisclosure. If you disclose and get fined, that would be bad, but if you don't reveal and the penalty for nondisclosure is bankruptcy for the company and all its executives, that would be worse.
>Tie in to a banking service, so you can do direct deposits to many millions of people, every time there's new settlements paid, and you'll be a folk hero.
We can debate semantics but if you describe yourself with a job title attached to a company then I suggest that you have an association which looks rather like ... employment.
Its not semantics at all, you just are excusing your own misunderstanding. He didn't describe himself with a job title, and he even explicitly states directly after listing those awards, that he is not an employee of Microsoft.
Extending your logic, I have a CCIE, so if I ever state I'm a CCIE, I'm an employee of Cisco? I have a masters degree by coursework from a university, so I I ever state I have an Msc, I'm an employee of the university? I have an electrical licences issued by EnergySafe Victoria, so if I say I'm an A-Grade Electrician, I'm an employee of EnergySafe Victoria?
Nobody is really disputing that Microsoft chose a confusing award name. However that name being confusing doesn't mean he is an employee or anything really like an employee.
I don't think many people would be confused into thinking a Microsoft Certified Application Developer or an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner are actually employees of those particular companies
> I'm saying those are bad attempts to argue that it's not a confusing title.
You might want to reread, nobody was arguing that.
> We can debate semantics but if you describe yourself with a job title attached to a company then I suggest that you have an association which looks rather like ... employment.
"Debating semantics" is arguing about which definition to use. There is no valid definition under which you can say that Troy is a Microsoft employee.
You can't say "I'm not wrong, You're just debating semantics", all you can say is "I was wrong because I was confused by a misleading title I wasn't familiar with."
cupofnotjoe pointed this out and got a bunch of responses from people with poor reading comprehension who entirely missed his point.
Edit: I use 'you' in the general sense here, not specifically the person I'm responding to.
> Its not semantics at all, you just are excusing your own misunderstanding. He didn't describe himself with a job title, and he even explicitly states directly after listing those awards, that he is not an employee of Microsoft.
Yes, I agree. (I believe you think I am arguing against this; for clarity, I am not).
> Extending your logic, I have a CCIE, so if I ever state I'm a CCIE, I'm an employee of Cisco? I have a masters degree by coursework from a university, so I I ever state I have an Msc, I'm an employee of the university? I have an electrical licences issued by EnergySafe Victoria, so if I say I'm an A-Grade Electrician, I'm an employee of EnergySafe Victoria?
I think these are poor examples and reinforce that the confusion was reasonable. That is the only point I've been arguing in this thread.
"Microsoft Regional Director" is not a job title. It is an award that Microsoft gives out only to non-employees.
You might think the award has a confusing name, and you would be correct. What you cannot be correct in asserting is that an award makes someone an employee because that award has a confusing name. That isn't a question of "semantics", if you assert that award makes him an employee, you are simply wrong.
I'll repeat what I said in a related thread: I'm not saying it makes him an employee. I'm saying those are bad attempts to argue the title isn't confusing.
I'm not sure what you're rebutting. This is roughly the thread as I understand it:
1. "Extending your logic, I have a CCIE, so if I ever state I'm a CCIE, I'm an employee of Cisco? [other examples follow]"
2. "All your examples are not things that commonly are job titles, so you are not 'extending logic'."
3. "They are the same class"
4. "No they aren't, those are not job titles, thus they don't imply employment"
...
#. "those weren't attempts to argue the title isnt confusing."
I don't know what you're reading but #1 is doing just that; roughly translated: "Why would 'Microsoft Regional Director' imply he works for Microsoft? If I have a CCIE does that mean I'm an employee of Cisco?"
#3 Being a Microsoft Regional Director makes him an employee and any claims otherwise are based on some arbitrary semantic distiction, not a real difference
#4 No, there is a real difference. That award is like these other awards and none of them take you anywhere near being an employee.
#5 the arguemnt in #3 is flawed because MRD is confusing and the example title others aren't. (Which misses the point, that using non-confusing examples is much better than using other confusing examples if you want to explain something.)
#6 that doesn't affect the argument being made in #4
#6 repeat ad nauseum
Troy is not a Microsoft employee, no ammount of semantic wiggling will make him a Microsoft employee, no matter how confused people are by the title of the MRD award. That confusion may be justifiable, but doubling down when your error has been explained is not.
"Microsoft Regional Director" is not a job title, it is an award. You thinking it sounds like a job title doesn't make it a job title, it makes you confused. Being given an award does not make you an employee, especially when that award is only given to non-employees.
You ar correct, "Microsoft Region Director" is an award, not a certification like the others mentioned so they aren't quite the same class, but the analogy still holds. Neither being given an award nor a certification makes you an employee.
Directly adjacent to the post it says "Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, run "Have I Been Pwned" and am a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals"
That reads to me like he's a Microsoft Employee. It's obviously important/significant enough to include it prominently on his website.
It's not a job title, it's some Microsoft program, like their MVP program.
The RD site linked from Troy's site isn't loading for me at the moment, but if you search "what is the microsoft regional director program" you get back information making it clear that it's not for MS Employees.
> The Microsoft Regional Directors program recognizes industry professionals for their cross-platform technical expertise, community leadership, public speaking[...]
You can be sure that the confusion is not accidental.
As I see it, it's a way for MS to profit from free labour for it's support service and a marketing stunt to benefit by association from the good reputation of this researcher and his initiative.
Even if it is not the case, people like the one previously will think: it is Microsoft employees that are managing this website, they know security.
That's a massive infrastructure change to pay out what would likely be peanuts to users, put a massive maintenance burden on the platform (payments are a nightmare system), and disproportionately benefit a law firm profiting off of the lawsuits and the good will of the brand. Seems like a shit deal to me.
> Tie in to a banking service, so you can do direct deposits to many millions of people, every time there's new settlements paid, and you'll be a folk hero.
That's not much of a motivation, given that Troy already is a folk hero.
Heh, such an American response. Sue everyone and everything, lawyers gets paid. But at the end of day, nothing changes.
Meanwhile in EU, we have laws like NIS2, where if negligent in non-compliance.
Fines are 10mil. EUR or 2% of global annual revenue.
Eg.: If Apple gets $8bil. fine, yep that changes quite a lot I think. :)
How does the EU solution make user's whole? At least with class actions, users get to see a few pennies.
I'm not trying to make an argument against strong regulatory bodies. We need those for sure. It would just be nice if the users were compensated for the exploitation and abuse they're subjected to.
The US solution does not make users whole and does not meaningfully change anything.
The EU solution meaningfully changes the offending company's behavior. I would rather have significantly less breaches of my information than a check for $6 in the mail every couple months.
> The EU solution meaningfully changes the offending company's behavior.
Citation needed. I'd imagine they just add a tiny markup to their prices to pay the eventual fine instead of investing huge amounts of money into fixing their broken processes. Comparing the list of EU-issued fines against the respective companies' profits shows that they can simply afford to make those mistakes instead of preventing them.
The EU solution provides incentive for the government to attack large businesses with lawsuits. That’s predatory and will lead to large businesses trying to lobby the EU to go after their competitors.
Great, they meant better acting corporations have no click or single click (dismiss-able with simple add-ons to proactively affirm the user's position) ribbons to get get rid of unwanted cookies. Let's be realistic anyone who hates those banners and hasn't bothered to do the google search and 5 minute task to get rid of them permanently (either enabling or disabling consent) is not having their political opinion changed by them, they are using them as an excuse to buttress their position of government bad or corporations malicious.
Do either of these approaches actually solve the problem? I think companies won't take it seriously unless their executives do, and their executives won't unless they are personally punished in a way compensation can't compensate for. Cane them Singapore style.
It's with American companies in mind. Though I expressly addressed that it isn't about lawyers getting paid, and also how this might change things (motivate companies to behave responsibly, in this regard)
Basically, we have a high-corruption society, especially in 2025, but there's still vestiges of a system that can be leveraged in the public's interest, if you contort just so.
Ah yes, automated lawsuit initiation, that's what we need! Ooh, we could run every breach announcement through Deep Research and let the AI make a determination on which one is negligence! That would definitely incentivize more transparency and accountability on behalf of companies!
Actually no, the end result of this will be a return to deny, deny, deny, because the worst case scenario then becomes the truth getting out.
IMHO we should be crucifying the liars and the truly negligent, but forgiving the honest and good faith efforts. At least for now, automating that judgment is pretty difficult and will result in more of the "customer service" like experiences that we already get from most big tech, except now it has the power to make or break companies.
Man we have sure moved on from the era of Blackstone's Ratio being a thing people united around. I'm not saying it should be applied literally, but punishing an innocent person should be considered a lot more wrong than not punishing a guilty person IMHO.
“Based on the investigation into this incident, it was determined that the
information involved may include your name, Social Security number, date of
birth, Driver’s License number (if provided), Tribal ID number (if provided),
medical record number, treatment, diagnosis, prescription and other medical
information, health insurance information, member portal username and
password, email address, and address.”
It’s not about innocence or guilt. If you leak so much information these people will have to monitor every single account, credit card, etc for life, on top of all their personal sensitive info being leaked and possibly accessed by unscrupulous employers. The damage is incredible. It’s not about innocence. It’s about responsibility.
I guess I should clarify: for incidents like that, I agree there should be severe consequences and blowback, including class action lawsuits and the like. If you are collecting stuff like SSN, DoB, DL number, etc then you definitely have a huge responsibility to protect that. I want to make data like that radioactive to collect so people think very carefully about whether they want to take on the liability.
What I don't think should happen is some automated lawyer combing the internet looking for any disclosures and then automatically filing lawsuits based on it.
I regularly use plus codes on my email addresses when I sign up for services, is there a way to search for an email address and all associated plus codes? Last I checked I couldn’t find that functionality.
If you use a custom domain, in the dashboard you can claim the whole domain and then see every breach for every address under it. Otherwise I don't think so.
Who has the record for being in the most breaches? My main email seems to currently be in 40 breaches, earliest one in from June 2011 (HackForums, don't even remember what that is), and last one in September 2024 (FrenchCitizens, although I'm not French nor have I ever lived in France).
For anyone considering, here are the 3 opt-outions that appear after you email verify:
1. Just remove my email address from public search
No one using the public HIBP search feature will be able to see your email address in the results. You’ll still be able to search your own address through the notification service, which verifies that you control the email before showing any results. If your email is part of a domain monitored by someone else (e.g., your employer), the domain controller will still be able to see it in domain-level searches.
2. Remove my email address from public search and delete the list of breaches it appears in
Your email address is no longer searchable — neither through the public service nor by you, even if you verify ownership — because the associated breaches have been deleted from the database. However, your email address is still retained by HIBP to ensure it is excluded from any future breaches and not added to your record.
3. Delete my email address completely
The record containing your email address will be completely deleted, meaning it will no longer appear in search results — for you or the public — at the time of deletion. However, if your email address appears in future data breaches, it will become publicly searchable again, as the opt-out record itself has also been deleted.
I assume if that ever happens, someone will register https://haveibeenpwnedbyhaveibeenpwned.com. It'll be the top post of HN for a couple of says while everyone argues in the comments about how the state of online security is "fundamentally broken" while someone asks if they can sue. Then we'll all forget and move on.
I think there was an earlier blog post from Troy sometime ago describing that HIBP never stores unencrypted email addresses; i.e. they are all hashed and any lookups go against the hash, not the actual email address.
This is a great site. Thanks for making it! I wish governments would take this kind of thing seriously though. Identity theft/stealing accounts/etc etc all starts with breaches like this and in the modern world it is often less devastating to have someone break into your house than to break into your digital life. With a break in you will get actual support in the form of a phone number to call (911 in the US) and real people doing real work to track down who did it and stop them. With the digital world you have nobody to call and even if you did I doubt much followup would happen. Society needs to change gears on this stuff and actually take it seriously.
Lots of regular people use Have I Been Pwned and sending them to 1Password is probably the single best thing you could do for them (I know it's a sponsorship - but it's a very complimentary one).
I'd make the language around that promo banner stronger (ie. "We strongly recommend") and make it stand out more on the page.
So many social media accounts get hacked[0] because of shared passwords and those affected users often end up on the site - funnelling them to a password manager and a reason why it's good hygiene is great.
ps. congrats on the relaunch!
[0] I've probably assisted 20+ such cases in the past ~12 months
It's a sponsorship, so I'm not complaining, but if the goal was really to get people to use a password manager he would be sending them to Bitwarden since they have a free plan, plus their paid plan is only $10/year compared to $36 for 1Password.
Besides the pricing, is there any reason to prefer Bitwarden over 1Password? Been happily using 1Password for some years, never had any issues, but maybe I'm glossing over anything? Probably the cli interface (`op`) is the one feature I couldn't live without today.
I can't speak about the other password managers, but 1Password's architecture ensures even 1Password can't see any of your credentials. It's E2E Encrypted.
I've been a 1Password user for over a decade. It's user friendly, and I'd rather not have the responsibility to self-host my company and extended family's credentials.
They both do e2ee so they cannot read your secrets server-side, which is the standard.
Critically though, Bitwarden is open source, meaning that if the encryption is weakened, it would be noticed in the source.
With 1Password the clients are closed source: you have to trust the company to encrypt the secrets properly and an (malicious or accidental) change of the encryption cannot be detected by the user.
After Lastpass's fiasco around encryption, I don't feel like blindly trusting another company.
There's something interesting in the domain search: some breaches contain addresses that... simply don't exist. Like B2BUSABusinesses has sales@mydomain.
I love this site! Though I do wonder how much this site also helps amateur hackers find where to search for a specific person's password. One way to deal with it could be to email the person their pwns.
As a security researcher who is into OSINT, HIBP is my first go to when obtaining an email address of interest. If it's found, it immediately helps me know which leaked DBs to go grep through and find more info about the target email addy.
Obtaining and storing TBs of leaked databases is another part of the puzzle that is always growing and a bit more complex.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadhttps://medium.com/design-bootcamp/the-rise-of-linear-style-...
A similar design wave is also happening with internal dashboard, admin interfaces. Thanks to https://ui.shadcn.com Personally, I'm fine with the standardization of such functional interface designs.
btw, for Have I Been Pwned, this is Bootstrap[2] and I'm not surprised it is also inheriting those design styles.
1. https://tailwindcss.com/plus
2. https://getbootstrap.com
Why not just use different passwords for different things. I'd recommend something like privacy.com so you can generate a bunch of one-use cc cards when doing shopping on sites you don't trust and the like.
Also don't willingly give up valuable personal information unless it's absolutely necessary, it's also not illegal to give online services outright false information (incorrect birthdates for example) which, in the event of a future data breach of that service, now at least those who would plan to benefit from your personal information might have some difficulties resetting important accs and the like.
You just gotta be smart, it's not about being powerless, HIBP and the service is just one tool to make you aware of what's out there before it gets used against you. (I would highly recommend setting up notifications for important e-mail addresses)
My card has been skimmed a couple of times and by far the most annoying part of the experience is having to reset and update regular accounts with the new number.
Of course for online purchases the whole flow here should be inverted: businesses should just be registering against my payment provider directly, no account numbers involved (under the hood maybe have it be managed by ED25519 public keys for identity?)
EDIT: while we're at it, why even have persistent numbers for in person cards? Let me tap it against my phone, invalidate the stored key from that time on, and generate a new one.
My latest card (debit) one has a feature I've not seen elsewhere, but I think kind of solves that too. It has a new CVC number every 10 minutes, which I kind of both hate and love. Love it for the obvious reasons of "not even having the physical card lets you use it digitally" but also because I cannot have it 100% in my password manager, I have to use the banking app to get the latest CVC code when I need it.
Plus then my gibberish name on my card number will match the gibberish secret question answers.
That's going to be one hell of a lot of an issue in practice. Hotels, car rentals and AFAIK even some airlines want that the name of the card holder matches the name on the ID card.
If your physical address gets leaked having a unique random password doesn't help with that. It's still a good idea though.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong but it looks like it might be a little off. I get:
- October 2013
- June 2008
- ...a bunch more...
- November 2021
- December 2020
I've been added to door/visitor notifications. I have received medical information for them. Retirement package info. A telecom internal tracker. A Doubleclick account for a while. Lessons for their children. Countless rewards accounts.
[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/breach/FrenchCitizens
Most probably some ancient legacy mainframe or whatnot other integration that nobody really has the time and budget to clean up and migrate to something more modern.
The larger the company, the larger the risk for ossification of anything deemed "business critical" because even a minuscule outage of one hour now is six if not seven figures worth of "lost" time.
It’s really just been a similar problem as with AI code, that without strong and competent management that can set intelligent expectations and requirements and test for them, you will surely get what appears to all the business and leadership types like an equivalent product, without any sense that it’s slop underneath the surface.
They just went into retirement?
You may have some kind of logging / tracking / analytics somewhere that logs request bodies. You don't even have to engage in marketing shenanigans for that to be a problem, an abuse prevention system (which is definitely a necessity at their scale) is enough.
Storing unsalted passwords in the "passwords database" is uncommon. Storing request logs from e.g. the Android app's API gateway, and forgetting to mark the `password` field in the forgot password flow as sensitive? Not so uncommon.
Yes, it's easy to fuck up. But a responsible company implements mitigations. And LinkedIn can absolutely afford to do much more.
If the method works, and it shows that the logging feature Fred got so much credit for is storing passwords, what are the political implications of that? Can our intrepid middle manager steal some of Fred's glory? Or is Fred an ally and it should be carefully handled? Or do they sit on it and wait until an opportune moment to destroy Fred?
This is the kind of reasoning process I think goes on, because I've seen very few large organisations make actually-good technical decisions.
Are their psychopaths and Machiavellian schemers in management? Certainly. Are they the majority? Almost certainly not, unless you're working for absolutely the wrong company.
As the Brits would say, "cock-up before conspiracy."
And unfortunately, a lot of people aren't emotionally intelligent enough to recognize that many managers use emotional reactions to redirect the room away from them. Because if you're the angry one, people won't ask questions like "didn't someone mention the possibility of this to you 6 months ago?"
I don't really agree with that, but let's say I do. Middle management is a unique position where their sensitivity is a bigger liability to everyone else. They have some power, but not a lot. They ironically have higher visibility in the company than upper management. And the job requires 0 technical understanding of what they manage.
So that puts them in an awkward position that is often abused. If they feel someone is going to get in trouble, they will make sure that's not them, which is a terribly common instinct. When a developer tells the company there is a problem to address that could threaten the product, that's a good thing that should be welcomed. Instead, many middle managers see that developer as the problem.
> Someone who can't factor that into their actions and communications is frankly lacking basic social skills.
No argument there.
If your logging is on an obscure enough endpoint (password reset flow in the Android app's API gateway), you may forget to add that endpoint to the bot, just like you may forget to mark it as sensitive in your logging system.
At this scale, the developers working on these esoteric endpoints might not even be aware that such a bot exists.
It does have some challenges in introducing a read-before-write to fetch the session key at the start of the session, but given the relatively low call volume of such flows that might be a small price to pay to simplify security audits and de-risk changes to any service in the call chain.
Unfortunately my understanding is that it’s trivial to implement unsoundly but it’s also not something for which there are an abundance of good implementations across languages.
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked though so maybe there is a newer, less radioactive approach. But yes, never actually sending the authenticator itself (and doing so in a way that the proof is valid only once) would stop this sort of thing cold.
So yeah, LinkedIn have never been exactly a bastion of IT Security.
And if you decline, it asks you again. Two times using different wording.
I was not only talking about that though, but also that they can build shadow profiles and recommend people to you that way.
On a related note, I no longer have an active linkedin account.
It did allow me to cheekily run a SQL GROUP BY once to see what the most common passwords were, though. Top password was actually "trustno1" IIRC, followed by all the usual suspects, e.g. abcdefg, 12345678 etc. (there were no meaningful password rules)
Instead, they could stagger them. Some blank space would still make it easier to understand visually, just not as much. If they did this, it would be a bit harder to see how which date-circle on the timeline corresponds to which tile, but that could be fixed somehow, like a dotted line that joins a tile to its circle or by moving the circle to one side of the center line.
They could also shrink the contents of the tiles themselves.
(1) There's no reason to have MORE space after "Compromised data:" than before it. It wastes space, and (IMHO) aesthetically it looks very awkward and clumsy.
(2) Personally, I'd also not double-space the bullet items. I can see how it adds emphasis, but it wastes a lot of space and to me it looks bad.
(3) Too much vertical space above the "View Details" button. Sure, some padding is nice, but why so much more here than between the icon (at the top of the tile) and the first paragraph?
I do find the timeline to be a little confusing- it seems to be ordered from earliest breach to most recent, but the dates on the timeline don't match that, as they seem to be when the data was leaked?
Display: breach date Ordering: breach published date?
I think it might be clearer to order + display the published date, and in the cards themselves show the breach date in a standard way.
Small bug report: I've been pwnd a few dozens times, and my timeline is not in calendar order. I see Adobe (October 2013), then LinkedIn (May 2012), then Dropbox (June 2012), then Lastfm (March 2012), then some 2016 ones, then Kickstarter in 2014, and then after that they start being more in order of the listed dates.
Tie in to a banking service, so you can do direct deposits to many millions of people, every time there's new settlements paid, and you'll be a folk hero.
Get lawyers who want negligent companies to actually regret the breaches, with judgements that hurt. (Rather than a small settlement that gets lawyers paid, but is only a small cost of doing business, which is preferable to doing business responsibly.)
Optional: Sell data of imminent lawsuits, to an investment firm.
Though, ideally, investors won't need this data, since everyone will know that a breach means a stock should take a hit. Isn't that how it should be.
I wish I could easily donate my tiny settlements to a good cause. It might make it worth the time to register for the class.
Isn't this just regulation?
1. How else would you penalize businesses?
2. What else would you do with fines?
If fines exist, it would seem foolish not to budget around that.
So that means that any kind of system that would improve traffic other than repressive measures would cost them twice, once to fix the situation and again when they can issue less fines.
The fines, and loss of license hurt them personally, professionally, and financially, but didn't change their behavior outside of the very short term.
In NZ we have people that are in and out of prison due to burglaries, robberies, etc... but the penalties don't change their longer term behavior.
There's a deeper problem, and penalties are important, but not the entire fix.
I just want to say that in modern times safety is put as #1 priority, while it's actually always a balance. E.g. we wanted the safest airline industry, we'd close the airports. But we balance the safety vs usefulness.
I don't think that's a logically self-consistent idea. The "actual occurrence of the offense" is not an inevitable pre-existing fact, it exists downstream of the size of the fine and efficiency of enforcement. If you fine people 5% of their annual income for going 1 mph over the speed limit, and put more traffic enforcement on the road, fewer people are going to speed.
So to answer the question "what's the ideal collection amount", you have to consider what the costs (economic and social) of rule breaking behavior are, and trade those off with how much behavior can be modified by fines, as well as the costs of enforcement.
Furthermore, just taking the statement at face value, the only way to actually collect the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense is to successfully fine 100% of offenders or fine some non-offenders, but even if this is possible it's almost certainly not the "ideal" amount of enforcement.
That says a whole lot all by itself. You acknowledge that reform doesn’t work? There is always money to be made because people don’t like the set of rules set? So when people follow all those rules, make new rules that people will break to keep it going? Where does it stop?
I agree with the overal position. Though I believe optimizing to collect zero fines is a bad measure.
A fine can be a relatively just mechanism to show that actions have consequences. And even the best people will occasionally make honest mistakes, so they will just get a fine instead of being persecuted for minor offences.
If fines degrade to a revenue stream, it's an indication something else is off with the financial structure inside the government. At least around here fines don't go into some official's private accounts, but I can see how they might "help" an underfunded department. Thinking about it this way, maybe we should consider funneling fines into a separate pool of money. Though I am not sure what to do when the fines are used to fix damage caused by the action (e.g. ecological damage). Governing is hard :(
Maybe this time we can come up with a better way to disincentivize corruption and bribery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[1] But the real solution is getting rid of money.
Getting a company to publicly announce a breach is hard today. Your suggestion would make it even harder, and more data breaches would be kept from the public because of the consequences.
I would rather know that a company messed up and change my password, than not knowing
How? Disclosure should already be legally required--class-actions and lawsuits should already be a thing. The Have I Been Pwned data sets aren't volunteered by these companies. It's a catalog of leaked data.
The class-action response of "identity monitoring" is nonsense. More companies, if they can't afford to or don't want secure data, shouldn't collect it or should aggressively purge it. User data should be a liability.
and how long until that data is breached?
I bet companies even buyback after these dips.
He is a Microsoft employee.
https://www.troyhunt.com/about/ says "I don't work for Microsoft"
We can debate semantics but if you describe yourself with a job title attached to a company then I suggest that you have an association which looks rather like ... employment.
Extending your logic, I have a CCIE, so if I ever state I'm a CCIE, I'm an employee of Cisco? I have a masters degree by coursework from a university, so I I ever state I have an Msc, I'm an employee of the university? I have an electrical licences issued by EnergySafe Victoria, so if I say I'm an A-Grade Electrician, I'm an employee of EnergySafe Victoria?
I don't think many people would be confused into thinking a Microsoft Certified Application Developer or an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner are actually employees of those particular companies
You might want to reread, nobody was arguing that.
> We can debate semantics but if you describe yourself with a job title attached to a company then I suggest that you have an association which looks rather like ... employment.
"Debating semantics" is arguing about which definition to use. There is no valid definition under which you can say that Troy is a Microsoft employee.
You can't say "I'm not wrong, You're just debating semantics", all you can say is "I was wrong because I was confused by a misleading title I wasn't familiar with."
cupofnotjoe pointed this out and got a bunch of responses from people with poor reading comprehension who entirely missed his point.
Edit: I use 'you' in the general sense here, not specifically the person I'm responding to.
> Its not semantics at all, you just are excusing your own misunderstanding. He didn't describe himself with a job title, and he even explicitly states directly after listing those awards, that he is not an employee of Microsoft.
Yes, I agree. (I believe you think I am arguing against this; for clarity, I am not).
> Extending your logic, I have a CCIE, so if I ever state I'm a CCIE, I'm an employee of Cisco? I have a masters degree by coursework from a university, so I I ever state I have an Msc, I'm an employee of the university? I have an electrical licences issued by EnergySafe Victoria, so if I say I'm an A-Grade Electrician, I'm an employee of EnergySafe Victoria?
I think these are poor examples and reinforce that the confusion was reasonable. That is the only point I've been arguing in this thread.
Just because the name for something is confusing, that doesn't change the nature of the thing named.
You might think the award has a confusing name, and you would be correct. What you cannot be correct in asserting is that an award makes someone an employee because that award has a confusing name. That isn't a question of "semantics", if you assert that award makes him an employee, you are simply wrong.
1. "Extending your logic, I have a CCIE, so if I ever state I'm a CCIE, I'm an employee of Cisco? [other examples follow]"
2. "All your examples are not things that commonly are job titles, so you are not 'extending logic'."
3. "They are the same class"
4. "No they aren't, those are not job titles, thus they don't imply employment"
...
#. "those weren't attempts to argue the title isnt confusing."
I don't know what you're reading but #1 is doing just that; roughly translated: "Why would 'Microsoft Regional Director' imply he works for Microsoft? If I have a CCIE does that mean I'm an employee of Cisco?"
#1 Troy works for Microsoft.
#2 No Troy doeys, as he clearly states.
#3 Being a Microsoft Regional Director makes him an employee and any claims otherwise are based on some arbitrary semantic distiction, not a real difference
#4 No, there is a real difference. That award is like these other awards and none of them take you anywhere near being an employee.
#5 the arguemnt in #3 is flawed because MRD is confusing and the example title others aren't. (Which misses the point, that using non-confusing examples is much better than using other confusing examples if you want to explain something.)
#6 that doesn't affect the argument being made in #4
#6 repeat ad nauseum
Troy is not a Microsoft employee, no ammount of semantic wiggling will make him a Microsoft employee, no matter how confused people are by the title of the MRD award. That confusion may be justifiable, but doubling down when your error has been explained is not.
You ar correct, "Microsoft Region Director" is an award, not a certification like the others mentioned so they aren't quite the same class, but the analogy still holds. Neither being given an award nor a certification makes you an employee.
That reads to me like he's a Microsoft Employee. It's obviously important/significant enough to include it prominently on his website.
He made it clear that he is not MS but this is the only time I saw such a misleading "title"
The RD site linked from Troy's site isn't loading for me at the moment, but if you search "what is the microsoft regional director program" you get back information making it clear that it's not for MS Employees.
https://rd.microsoft.com/en-us/
> The Microsoft Regional Directors program recognizes industry professionals for their cross-platform technical expertise, community leadership, public speaking[...]
As I see it, it's a way for MS to profit from free labour for it's support service and a marketing stunt to benefit by association from the good reputation of this researcher and his initiative.
Even if it is not the case, people like the one previously will think: it is Microsoft employees that are managing this website, they know security.
That's not much of a motivation, given that Troy already is a folk hero.
Meanwhile in EU, we have laws like NIS2, where if negligent in non-compliance. Fines are 10mil. EUR or 2% of global annual revenue. Eg.: If Apple gets $8bil. fine, yep that changes quite a lot I think. :)
I'm not trying to make an argument against strong regulatory bodies. We need those for sure. It would just be nice if the users were compensated for the exploitation and abuse they're subjected to.
The EU solution meaningfully changes the offending company's behavior. I would rather have significantly less breaches of my information than a check for $6 in the mail every couple months.
Citation needed. I'd imagine they just add a tiny markup to their prices to pay the eventual fine instead of investing huge amounts of money into fixing their broken processes. Comparing the list of EU-issued fines against the respective companies' profits shows that they can simply afford to make those mistakes instead of preventing them.
Ironically, this counter-argument applies perfectly to the "US solution".
On the contrary, EU's huge fines have a better chance of being effective.
That just seems dysfunctional.
How are those cookie consent popups working out?
Meaningful does not mean a solution.
Basically, we have a high-corruption society, especially in 2025, but there's still vestiges of a system that can be leveraged in the public's interest, if you contort just so.
Actually no, the end result of this will be a return to deny, deny, deny, because the worst case scenario then becomes the truth getting out.
IMHO we should be crucifying the liars and the truly negligent, but forgiving the honest and good faith efforts. At least for now, automating that judgment is pretty difficult and will result in more of the "customer service" like experiences that we already get from most big tech, except now it has the power to make or break companies.
Man we have sure moved on from the era of Blackstone's Ratio being a thing people united around. I'm not saying it should be applied literally, but punishing an innocent person should be considered a lot more wrong than not punishing a guilty person IMHO.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/Partnership%20HealthPlan%20o...
“Based on the investigation into this incident, it was determined that the information involved may include your name, Social Security number, date of birth, Driver’s License number (if provided), Tribal ID number (if provided), medical record number, treatment, diagnosis, prescription and other medical information, health insurance information, member portal username and password, email address, and address.”
It’s not about innocence or guilt. If you leak so much information these people will have to monitor every single account, credit card, etc for life, on top of all their personal sensitive info being leaked and possibly accessed by unscrupulous employers. The damage is incredible. It’s not about innocence. It’s about responsibility.
What I don't think should happen is some automated lawyer combing the internet looking for any disclosures and then automatically filing lawsuits based on it.
Can we make it so that companies I've never heard of before don't have my data in the first place?
john@hotmail.com has 340!
https://haveibeenpwned.com/OptOut
For anyone considering, here are the 3 opt-outions that appear after you email verify:
1. Just remove my email address from public search
No one using the public HIBP search feature will be able to see your email address in the results. You’ll still be able to search your own address through the notification service, which verifies that you control the email before showing any results. If your email is part of a domain monitored by someone else (e.g., your employer), the domain controller will still be able to see it in domain-level searches.
2. Remove my email address from public search and delete the list of breaches it appears in
Your email address is no longer searchable — neither through the public service nor by you, even if you verify ownership — because the associated breaches have been deleted from the database. However, your email address is still retained by HIBP to ensure it is excluded from any future breaches and not added to your record.
3. Delete my email address completely
The record containing your email address will be completely deleted, meaning it will no longer appear in search results — for you or the public — at the time of deletion. However, if your email address appears in future data breaches, it will become publicly searchable again, as the opt-out record itself has also been deleted.
I'd make the language around that promo banner stronger (ie. "We strongly recommend") and make it stand out more on the page.
So many social media accounts get hacked[0] because of shared passwords and those affected users often end up on the site - funnelling them to a password manager and a reason why it's good hygiene is great.
ps. congrats on the relaunch!
[0] I've probably assisted 20+ such cases in the past ~12 months
I've been a 1Password user for over a decade. It's user friendly, and I'd rather not have the responsibility to self-host my company and extended family's credentials.
Critically though, Bitwarden is open source, meaning that if the encryption is weakened, it would be noticed in the source.
With 1Password the clients are closed source: you have to trust the company to encrypt the secrets properly and an (malicious or accidental) change of the encryption cannot be detected by the user.
After Lastpass's fiasco around encryption, I don't feel like blindly trusting another company.
Obtaining and storing TBs of leaked databases is another part of the puzzle that is always growing and a bit more complex.