Critical Point War Stories with Kevin Riggle

What is the role of a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer)? - Melanie Ensign - Bonus

Critical Point — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Host Kevin Riggle interviews Melanie Ensign, former Global Head of Security, Privacy, & Engineering Communications for Uber, about what the role of a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) is. (Hint: It's not being the smartest security person in the room.)

Bonus episode from https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/the-reporter-called-her-christmas-day-melanie-ensign-bug-bounty-incident-management-programs

Video: https://youtu.be/e60YHYHTFUk

Melanie's newsletter: https://discernibleinc.com/newsletter-signup
Melanie's company: https://discernibleinc.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieensign/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/imeluny
Mastodon: https://defcon.social/@Wednesday

To subscribe to the video version of the podcast on YouTube, and watch other Critical Point content, check out https://youtube.com/@critical-point

Credits:

Edited by sleepingsage.

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.

https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

He Won George Hotz's Money - Andrey Petrov

Critical Point — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 06:11:35 -0700

Host Kevin Riggle interviews Andrey Petrov about three different incidents he was involved with: A programming mistake in high school that filled its alumni's email inboxes, a Twitter analytics site he built that got co-opted as part of a phishing scam, and how he won a bug bounty on the Ethereum blockchain rollup prototype developed by superstar hacker George Hotz.

Chapters:

(00:00) - Intros/titles
(05:02) - The Alumni Email Explosion
(18:00) - The Twitter Tracker Takeover
(33:09) - The George Hotz Ethereum Rollups Bug Bounty Bonanza
(57:02) - Socials/outro

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWuqAePsquo

News coverage of the Twitter Tracker Takeover:
“New Twitter Scam Won't Show You Your 'Stalkers'” - NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44123467
“Beware: Twitter spam viral application on the loose” - Posilan
https://www.posilan.com/2011/07/20/beware-twitter-spam-viral-application-on-the-loose/
“After a lull of a few months, new Twitter Phishing Scam phrases appear” - Just Practising
https://www.justpractising.com/social-tools/twitter/after-a-lull-new-twitter-phishing-scam-phrases-appear/

Andrey's Twitter: https://twitter.com/shazow
Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/shazow.eth
Web site: https://shazow.net/

To subscribe to the video version of the podcast on YouTube, and watch other Critical Point content, check out https://youtube.com/@critical-point

Credits:

Edited by sleepingsage.

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.

https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

The Reporter Called Her Christmas Day - Melanie Ensign - Bug Bounty & Incident Management

Critical Point — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Kevin Riggle interviews Melanie Ensign (Discernible Inc.), former Global Head of Security, Privacy, & Engineering Communications for Uber, about building good bug bounty programs, incident management processes, and one especially memorable Christmas morning.

Melanie's company: https://discernibleinc.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieensign/
Twitter: https://x.com/imeluny
Mastodon: https://defcon.social/@Wednesday

Credits:

Edited by sleepingsage. Transcript & subtitles by Melody Wisp.

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.

https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

The Future Is (Literally!) Bright - How Infrastructure Works, by Deb Chachra - Climate, Energy, & the Future

Critical Point — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 06:03:00 -0700

Kevin Riggle interviews Deb Chachra, professor of engineering at Olin College and author of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS about climate change, the housing crisis, the green/sustainable energy transition, and how we can build a better world for ourselves and everyone around us.

BUY DEB'S BOOK! https://criticalpoint.tv/infrastructure

Deb's Twitter: https://twitter.com/debcha
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/debcha.bsky.social
Mastodon: https://saturation.social/@debcha
Web site: http://debcha.org

Big Dig podcast from WGBH Boston: https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig

Chapters:

Credits:

Edited by sleepingsage. Transcript & subtitles by Melody Wisp.

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.

https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Was Akamai the Velvet Underground of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)? - Abhijit Mehta - Bonus

Critical Point — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 03:13:58 -0700

Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta about Akamai and its role in the history and development of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Bonus episode outtake from https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/he-broke-turkish-twitter-abhijit-mehta

Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehta
Abhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/

To watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube, check out the channel page at https://youtube.com/@critical-point

Credits:

Transcript/captions by Melody Wisp (https://melodywisp.carrd.co/#commissions).

Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

He Broke Turkish Twitter - Abhijit Mehta

Critical Point — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 18:20:46 -0800

Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta, who tells how one tiny dot made almost made a massive difference to Twitter's Turkish ad revenue.

Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehta
Abhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/

Chapters:

(00:00) - Intro
(01:25) - How did you find yourself in a place where you could break production?
(08:53) - Akamai & the 'aha' moments of product development
(15:30) - Google & the Google culture
(17:35) - Twitter & what's the difference between brand ads and direct-response ads?
(23:58) - How Twitter made its money
(27:58) - Re-architecting the fundamental ad platform at Twitter
(32:35) - "We had to be really careful!"
(34:48) - "There's something really weird happening in Turkey"
(37:49) - The meaning of scale
(41:02) - "Well we'd thought of all the horses, so we started looking for zebras"
(43:48) - "So here's what happened"
(49:30) - "So this will work fine almost everywhere"
(53:51) - How do you roll things like this out safely?
(59:56) - "In general I'm an optimist, there's exciting things to come"
(01:03:52) - Thanks & CTAs

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

She Missed the Overnight Push! - Julia Lunetta

Critical Point — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 02:10:54 -0800

Kevin Riggle interviews Julia Lunetta, who tells us how an ostensibly minor change caused her employer, a financial institution (Upromise Investments), to miss its overnight reconciliation with its banks.

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

She Made Dropbox Give the Internet Free Watermelon? - Kate Rudolph

Critical Point — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 22:08:54 -0700

Kevin Riggle interviews Kate Rudolph, who tells how a rolled back commit on her intern project resulted in Dropbox, her employer, offering free watermelon to the entire Internet.

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

He Locked Players Out On Launch Day - Zachery Johnson

Critical Point — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 18:23:05 -0700

Kevin Riggle interviews Zachery Johnson, who tells how an innocent command doomed the database servers and locked players out of Diablo II: Resurrected on Day 2 of launch.

Blizzard's blog post on the incident: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d2r/t/diablo-ii-resurrected-outages-an-explanation-how-we%E2%80%99ve-been-working-on-it-and-how-we%E2%80%99re-moving-forward/28164

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Twelve Lines of Code Took Down the Whole Company - Patrick O'Doherty

Critical Point — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 17:13:01 -0700

Kevin Riggle interviews Patrick O'Doherty, who tells how a seemingly-simple configuration change one Friday morning led to a massive outage.

Patrick's web site: https://patrickod.computer

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

He Broke (part of) The Internet - Willie Williams

Critical Point — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 03:16:38 -0700

Kevin Riggle interviews Willie Williams, who tells the story of the time he accidentally took down a major site while an intern at Akamai.

Willie's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigwilliestyle

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes