Troy Hunt

src: www.troyhunt.com

Troy Hunt is an Australian web security expert known for public education and outreach on security topics. He created Have I Been Pwned?, a data breach search website that allows non-technical users to see if their personal information has been compromised. He has also authored several popular security-related courses on Pluralsight, and regularly presents keynotes and workshops on security topics. He also is the creator of ASafaWeb, a tool that performs automated security analysis on ASP.NET websites. Starting in 2011, Hunt was named a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Developer Security, and was recognized as a Microsoft MVP of the Year in 2011. He was also named a Microsoft Regional Director in 2016.

Video Troy Hunt

Data breaches

As part of his work administering the Have I Been Pwned? website, Hunt is frequently involved in the publication of data breaches, and is often cited by journalists as a data breach expert.

In August 2015, following the Ashley Madison data breach, Hunt received many emails from Ashley Madison members asking for help. He criticized the company for doing a poor job informing its userbase.

In February 2016, children's toy maker VTech, who had suffered a major data breach months earlier, updated its terms of service to absolve itself of wrongdoing in the event of future breaches. Hunt, who had added the data from VTech's breach to the databases of Have I Been Pwned?, published a blog post harshly criticizing VTech's new policy, calling it "grossly negligent." He later removed the VTech breach from the database, citing that only two people besides himself had access to the data and wishing to reduce the chance of its spread.

In February 2017, Hunt published details of vulnerabilities in the Internet-connected children's toy, CloudPets, which had allowed access to 820,000 user records as well as 2.2 million audio files belonging to those users.

Maps Troy Hunt

Education

Hunt is known for his efforts in security education for computer and IT professionals. He has created several dozen courses on Pluralsight, an online education and training website for computer and creative professionals. He is one of the primary course authors for Pluralsight's Ethical Hacking path, a collection of courses designed for the Certified Ethical Hacker certification.

Additionally, Hunt works in education by speaking at technology conferences and running workshops. His primary workshop, titled Hack Yourself First, aims to teach software developers with little security background how to defend their applications by looking at them from an attacker's perspective.