Troy Hunt

Troy Hunt, Australian security researcher and founder of Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), will be delivering an international keynote on “Rise of the Breaches”, at the ITWeb Security Summit 2021, to be held as a virtual event from 1 to 3 June.

He made headlines in SA in 2017 after he unearthed the country’s biggest data breach which exposed the personal information of about 30 million South Africans.

Hunt started Have I Been Pwned in 2013 to help people find out if they have fallen victim to a data breach. This free service that aggregates data breaches has gained enormous popularity and currently contains several billion records from these incidents and processes thousands of requests each day. Should a service such as Dropbox or LinkedIn be hacked, and the data published online, he helps the individuals impacted by the incident learn of their exposure. 

Hunt has a background in software development specialising in information security. He regularly appears in the media and speaks at events,  works with government and law enforcement agencies and has appeared before US Congress testifying on the impact of data breaches. 

"Data breaches are the new normal," says Hunt. "We’ve created ecosystems with so many moving parts and so many complex units, it’s little wonder that we so frequently see them go wrong." 

The cost and ease of the cloud have made the situation a lot worse, because it has never been cheaper, faster or easier to put stuff online, and, at the same time, it's never been easier to stuff if all up, Hunt says.

Delegates attending his keynote on day two of Security Summit (2 June) will get a look inside the world of data breaches: what’s motivating hackers, how they’re gaining access to data and how organisations are dealing with the aftermath of attacks.

Hunt's keynote will help to contextualise these incidents and understand both what these attacks actually look like and how to defend against them in the organisation.