Transcript
A (0:00)
Cybersecurity Today would like to thank Meter for their support in bringing you this podcast. Meter delivers a complete network stack, wired, wireless and cellular in one integrated solution that's built for performance and scale. Welcome to Cybersecurity Today, our month in review show where our panel takes a look at the month that we've just gone through and maybe looks to the month ahead. So welcome everybody. And I wanted to. We've got our panel. I should introduce him, Laura Payne from White Toque and and David Shipley from Boceron securities. And we get together once a month to talk about what happened this month at some level of depth and, and hopefully we try to go forward into the next month to find things that that may be happening of interest. I'm gonna let you guys start. I've obviously I brought a whole pile of AI stuff to the party because I think that was the big thing that happened this month. But does anybody want to start with a story that's not AI?
B (1:02)
Well, I'm going to go with the three letter horror story of October for the cloud. Does anyone know what that would be? D N S two cloud providers down. It's wow, amazing. And it the fragility of just how much stuff depends on these things. So AWS go aws US Northeast goes down and the world literally slows down and that's still like we have created this massive cloud based single point of failure that's epic. And my favorite part about this, and I feel, I do feel bad, there were people that bought $2,700 beds. These smart beds had, they're the next generation of those late night TV ads. The beds go up, the beds go down, they're heated, they're cooled. I'm not going to lie, I've got a lot of FOMO when I'm describing these things. But apparently these things require a constant connection to AWS to go down, to turn the heat off, to function at all. And so there were a number of tragic stories during AWS's outage of people sleeping on their floor because their bed was set to roasting, because they like to go into a toasty bed and they got, they got a really bad deal out of that bed. And I will say this, you know, yesterday, it's first time in a long time I had a chance to order from Pizza Hut online and the team had been talking about Pizza Hut all week. I was really excited. I got there, got to the point where I was going to put my credit card in and no Biano credit card was not Processed. So thank you, Azure. I had to pay a dollar extra for my pizza order because I had to pay for it in person and that was at least to my worries. But man, DNS still out there. Still the big Halloween nightmare for it.
A (2:52)
Yeah, and I think everybody in our audience probably knows what DNS is. The phone book of the Internet, whatever you want to call it, the addresses of everything, a simple thing. How old is this idea? 30 years now. And this is a scary part of this. So just to recap for those who didn't, who missed this, Amazon went down. The northeast region of Amazon went down. And of course because if you believe, if you get the brochures or read the website that they just flip over to a new region. Not a problem. Didn't work. All of those safety devices just took a lot longer. Now as I heard the story, this was, this is a two time story. It's the DNS failure which is a big thing but also one of those just those moments where you just, what did they call it, a race condition in software is that where you both things try to write to the same spot and one and they blank each other out because somebody loses the race or in this case a tie is bad. But just simple things. Knock out something simple and a house of cards comes down. It makes me really sit back and go we have everything from our beds to our houses to our pizza. Everything we do is tied into the cloud and we really haven't advanced a lot in 30 years. As a matter of fact we're sitting on this sort of fragile house of cards and I find that kind of scary.
