We’re going teetotal: It’s goodbye to The Daily Swig

Jessica Haworth 02 March 2023 at 14:05 UTC

PortSwigger today announces that The Daily Swig is closing down

Over the past five-and-a-half years, The Daily Swig has provided an independent and high-quality perspective on cybersecurity news and topics.

We are proud of everything that the Swig has achieved, and to this point, we are sorry to announce that this journey has come to an end.

The Daily Swig launched in 2017 to provide a free, independent news service to the web security community.

During this period, the way that readers consume news has evolved considerably. News today is largely consumed through various aggregators, with little loyalty to, or even awareness of, the news publisher’s brand. In this context, there is limited business value for a software vendor to provide a service such as The Daily Swig at no cost.

PortSwigger founder Dafydd Stuttard explains: “Additionally, The Daily Swig’s remit, of providing robust, editorially-independent reporting carries various costs and risks to our business.

“We have written stories about numerous bad actors, some of whom are well-funded, and we have been obliged to pay settlements for malicious legal actions. We have sometimes been targeted by activists seeking to damage our software business because they dislike our story. This reality made it harder to justify continuing with the Swig.

“I would like to thank the Swiggers and freelance journalists who have created such excellent output for The Daily Swig over the years.”

PortSwigger employees affected by the closure of The Daily Swig have been invited to apply for any other role that exists within the company, with the alternative of a redundancy package.

End of an era

As a team, we would like to thank our readers for their support. We’d also like to thank the security researchers, bug bounty hunters, software developers, and others across the infosec industry we have had the pleasure of interviewing over the years.

“I’ve covered the topic of infosec across many outlets since 1997,” journalist John Leyden commented.

“In all that time, I’ve never become so immersed in a segment of the community than [during my time] reporting on web security for The Daily Swig.”

Adam Bannister shared: “One personal standout was my conversation with Tommy DeVoss, whose journey from black hat hacker, to jail, to high-earning bug hunter really demonstrates the wisdom of providing legal protections and financial incentives for good-faith hacking.

“Another was how a peculiarity of Japanese punctuation exacerbated a privacy flaw that leaked one-word search terms in Chrome and Firefox. This was far from a critical issue, but showed the tricky trade-offs involved in applying patches or mitigations, and was a story I’d tracked for 16 months.”

We’d like to conclude our final article by sharing some more of the stories we’re most proud of working on during our time at The Daily Swig.

John Leyden spoke to Black Hat founder Jeff Moss about his work consulting on TV program Mr Robot and how he pushed for authenticity in the show.

We took time to celebrate the positive achievements across the web security sphere in our annual roundup, a move that was widely praised in an industry that so often focuses on the negatives.

Another story that was loved by our readers was this roundup of the top 10 hacking films of all time.

Always on top of the latest web hacking vulnerabilities, Ben Dickson wrote this fantastic explainer on the relatively recently emerging bug prototype pollution.

Emma Woollacott interviewed Marcus Hutchins on the fifth anniversary of the infamous WannaCry ransomware attack, as he spoke about the day he discovered the kill switch by registering a web domain found in the malware’s code.

Aside from tricky technical reporting, Charlie Osborne often also reported on issues affecting the infosec community, more recently covering the criticism by researchers of certain bug disclosure practices.

And Stephen Pritchard shared this analysis on the rise of ‘million dollar bug bounties’ and whether the promise of record-breaking payouts matches up to reality.

–The Daily Swig team