Zero Downtime

John Hass
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Technology
  • Biweekly

Zero Downtime brings together tech, business, and the everyday experiences of running an IT company. John and Logan discuss what’s going on in their world, the questions people ask them most, and talk with other business owners and professionals in conversations that are real, relaxed, and worth your time.

  1. 3d ago

    Binance Hacker Swaps $5M for $71, Europe’s Freezers Hacked, Nuclear in a Box, Altman Wants Your RAM

    Binance lost $6.3 billion in one of the largest cryptocurrency hacks in history. Then the hacker swapped $5 million worth of stolen tokens for $71. European supermarket freezers are getting hacked across seven countries, with some systems set as high as 131 degrees Fahrenheit. A California company just got DOE approval to begin full-power testing of a nuclear reactor small enough to transport on a semi-truck. And Sam Altman thinks the memory in your personal computer is being wasted. This week, John and Logan cover seven stories from crypto chaos, physical-infrastructure attacks, nuclear innovation, AI policy, and the ongoing Microsoft reliability report. Stories in this episode: Binance hacked for $6.3 billion. On October 29, the exchange suffered a breach after an attacker compromised a DevOps engineer’s laptop and gained access to internal infrastructure. Binance says customer funds will be covered, and blockchain investigators report roughly $2.7 billion has been frozen or recovered. Then, while trying to unload the stolen cryptocurrency, a wallet linked to the hacker dumped 908,793 PROM tokens worth about $5 million into a nearly empty Uniswap V2 liquidity pool and received 0.0316 Ethereum in return. That is $71. Blockchain analysts estimate the hacker lost around $119 million through unfavorable swaps. Europe’s freezers get hacked. Reports are coming in from Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Finland. Some systems were reportedly set as high as 131 degrees Fahrenheit. Ireland’s SuperValu reported 13 affected locations. This follows France’s similar October attacks affecting approximately 700 locations. Nuclear power in a shipping container. California company Radiant announced on October 29 that the Department of Energy approved the safety analysis for full-power testing of its commercial nuclear microreactor, Kaleidos. The reactor is designed to produce approximately one megawatt of continuous electricity, uses helium cooling and advanced TRISO fuel, and operates for approximately five years between refueling cycles. Initial commercial deliveries are targeted for 2028. Sam Altman wants your RAM. On the Cheeky Pint podcast, the OpenAI CEO called it “quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time.” He argued memory should be concentrated in cloud data centers. This arrives while consumer RAM prices climb because AI infrastructure demand is prioritized by memory manufacturers. Plus France’s proposal to tax the internet at 5.5 euro cents per gigabyte (which passed the National Assembly by a single vote partly because two lawmakers pressed the wrong buttons), Cisco handing a 27-year-old unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of its legacy code with a team of two, and the Microsoft Weekly Damage Report covering Exchange Online blocking encrypted email replies, Copilot Chat’s short-term memory loss, OneDrive migration jobs stuck, Outlook Notes stuck loading, and Teams unable to display full Out-of-Office messages. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

  2. Nov 2

    Microsoft Offers 60,000 Employees Exit, Sony So-net Hacked, iPhone Duo Snaps, MS Damage

    Microsoft just made roughly 60,000 employees eligible for a Voluntary Exit Offer. Sony’s So-net internet service was breached, exposing over 2.58 million customer records and 54,000 email passwords (while the headline insisted no passwords were leaked). Apple’s new $1,999 folding iPhone Duo has started cracking at the hinge within days of launch. And Microsoft’s Weekly Damage Report returns with Exchange Server disrupted by Windows Server updates. This week, John and Logan cover four stories from workforce decisions, data breaches, folding-phone reality checks, and the ongoing Microsoft reliability report. Stories in this episode: Microsoft’s Voluntary Exit Offer. Chief people officer Amy Coleman announced the program on October 26. It covers employees in participating teams at Microsoft’s internal level 70 and below across the US, Canada, UK, and India. Microsoft confirmed roughly 60,000 employees qualify out of a reported 223,000 workforce. Microsoft has not announced it fired 60,000 people. 60,000 are eligible for an offer. Employees have until the first week of December to decide. Sony’s So-net breach. Sony Network Communications disclosed unauthorized access to its Japanese internet service database, identifying 2,141,986 So-net records and 443,495 plala S Course records. The notice also identifies 54,401 email addresses with compromised email passwords, 16 bank account records, and seven password-reset notice records. Credit card information was not included. The confirmed email-password exposure concerns four services: Mail Service G, A-Box, So-net VAIO Mail, and PostPet Mail. iPhone Duo cracks. Apple’s new $1,999 folding iPhone went on sale October 23. Within days, some owners reported cracked inner screens, sometimes accompanied by resistance when opening the hinge and a popping noise. Apple acknowledged the issue on October 26 and directed customers to AppleCare for replacement. iFixit’s teardown identified a possible stress point near the central support, close to where reported screen damage appears. Microsoft’s Weekly Damage Report. Exchange Server on-premises installations could experience failed Outlook on the web sign-ins and growing mail queues after October’s Windows Server security updates. Microsoft traced it to a new default limit of 512 simultaneous Endpoint Lookup calls in Windows’ RPC Endpoint Mapper. Exchange Online had a separate incident where some users could not access mailboxes; service was restored October 27 after infrastructure restarts. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

  3. Oct 26

    PHP2Shell Zero-Days Hit, Certificate Authority’s Private Key Was Literally 4

    PHP had the kind of week that makes system administrators look at a cornfield and reconsider their career choices. Two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, emergency patches, and a race to exploit them. Meanwhile, a certificate authority trusted to help authenticate the internet managed to produce a private key with the numerical value of four. This week, John and Logan break down the PHP2Shell story and the eMudhra certificate authority incident where the cryptography was not defeated. Someone just counted. Stories in this episode: PHP2Shell: critical bugs, emergency patches, and the race to exploit PHP. CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 both carry a critical 9.2 CVSS v4 rating. The first involves running out of memory at a particularly bad moment during request initialization. The second is a use-after-free where internal state survives after the memory it refers to has been freed. Researchers demonstrated working remote code execution from both. Apache with mod_php behaves differently than PHP-FPM, and that affects the attack. Amazon says its MadPot honeypots recorded exploitation attempts four days before public disclosure. Sansec revised its initial assessment on October 22 to say mass exploitation appeared less likely than first expected because attacks needed specific knowledge and conditions on the target. Emergency fixed releases are 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12. Restart the workers after updating. eMudhra: the certificate authority whose private key was literally 4. Eight compromised intermediate CA keys were small integers. Mozilla independently confirmed that all eight were below 256 and could be recovered almost instantly. Six were for TLS, two for code signing. These were elliptic curve keys using P-384, where the secret is supposed to be selected unpredictably from an enormous range. eMudhra says the affected intermediates were created during an April 30, 2025 key generation ceremony using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified hardware security modules, and a wrap-and-unwrap step produced a weak set of keys alongside the intended strong ones. The problem remained undetected for about 18 months through two independent audit cycles. eMudhra revoked all eight intermediates on October 18 and has now stated it is exiting the public TLS business. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

  4. Oct 19

    Denmark Breached With “123456”, Fortnite Hits Linux, French Freezers Hacked, Ledger Spy Implants

    Denmark’s national population register got breached through a vendor whose administrator password was reportedly “123456”, and the intrusion was finally caught because the invoice looked too high. Fortnite is coming to Linux, with a boot-chain checklist long enough to require reading glasses. French supermarkets had their refrigeration systems hacked, with attackers forcing freezers into defrost mode and ruining stock. And Ledger confirmed that criminals had been slipping cellular spy implants into genuine hardware wallets. This week, John and Logan cover eight stories from cybersecurity, gaming, physical infrastructure attacks, and the ongoing Microsoft reliability report. Stories in this episode: Denmark’s “123456” breach. Authorities confirmed unauthorized access to the Central Person Register through a private company’s legitimate access, affecting information associated with approximately 8.8 million people. Reporting says Pays ApS had three accounts, including an administrator account, using the same simple password. The incident involved roughly 14 million searches over 10 days and was discovered October 2 when a staff member noticed an invoice showing unusually high activity. Fortnite on Linux. Epic announced a preview launcher for Windows, macOS, and Linux on October 14, with Fortnite following once its rebuilt Easy Anti-Cheat implementation is ready. The requirements include TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, signed kernels, measured boot, IOMMU protections, kernel lockdown, and more. Steam Deck does not currently meet those requirements. French supermarket refrigeration hacked. Overnight October 11 into October 12, attackers remotely manipulated supermarket refrigeration systems at Intermarche, Coopérative U, Carrefour, and E.Leclerc. CERT-FR identified compromised Danfoss, Copeland xweb, and Dixell xweb systems. Attackers forced equipment into defrost operation, allowing food to warm. Ledger spy-implant crisis. The company confirmed a physical implant attack involving genuine devices modified after manufacture and returned to distribution through resellers in Southeast Asia. The implants decoded recovery phrases from the display and transmitted them over LTE using an eSIM. The Secure Element and OS remained intact, so devices still passed Ledger’s integrity checks. Meanwhile Ledger is pitching a new $849 Atom device shipping summer 2027. Plus Sweden’s reality show losing its finished season when the backup failed, Palantir’s CTO claiming AI researchers have started smoking to bet on an AI cancer cure, a cybersecurity executive and extortion-negotiation author now facing federal extortion-related conspiracy charges, and the latest Microsoft Weekly Damage Report covering Exchange trouble, Global Secure Access, Remote Desktop failures, and 1,411 vulnerabilities including three zero-days. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

  5. Oct 12

    iPhone 18 Pro Max Broken on AT&T, ArtCraft Rebuilds Adobe, Citrix Was That Bad, Don’t Hack FBI

    Some iPhone 18 Pro Max owners on AT&T have phones that can’t reliably make phone calls, and Apple says the already-broken ones need hardware replacement. A group of developers is rebuilding Adobe’s entire creative suite from scratch as open-source Rust applications. The Citrix NetScaler story we covered last week turned out to be exactly as bad as the shutdown warnings suggested. And a suspected ShinyHunters member who allegedly hacked the FBI is now reportedly helping the FBI identify everyone else in the group. This week, John and Logan cover five stories from Apple’s launch problems, the open-source Adobe exit, confirmed cybersecurity zero-days, and the ongoing Microsoft reliability report. Stories in this episode: iPhone 18 Pro Max is broken on AT&T. AT&T customers started reporting intermittent or complete cellular failures almost immediately after launch. Calls would fail. SMS would not arrive. Data would stop working. On October 3, Apple publicly confirmed the issue and released iOS 27.0.1 plus a new AT&T carrier settings update. Those are meant to prevent unaffected phones from developing the failure. Phones that have already lost service require hardware replacement. Adobe on Linux. A group of developers has started building open-source clean-room reimplementations of Adobe’s entire creative lineup, mostly in Rust. PhotoCraft for Photoshop. VectorCraft for Illustrator. FilmCraft for Premiere. The applications are young and several are alpha. But after a decade of Adobe subscriptions, early termination fees, FTC lawsuits, forced AI, and cloud features getting discontinued, somebody is finally building the door. Citrix NetScaler zero-days confirmed. Citrix disclosed eight NetScaler vulnerabilities including CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772, both at 9.5 severity. Mandiant reported exploitation since early September across government, financial services, technology, education, and telecom. Attackers obtained root access, deployed custom malware, and conducted internal reconnaissance. Patching does not necessarily evict an attacker who got in before you patched. Don’t hack the FBI. “Rey” (Saif al-Din Khader), a suspected ShinyHunters member detained in Jordan, is reportedly cooperating with the FBI and helping investigators identify other group members. The FBI publicly said “arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk.” Apparently they do. Plus the Microsoft Weekly Damage Report covering Outlook auto-installing unwanted add-ins, Copilot buttons disappearing from classic Outlook, Intune Autopilot broken for a day, Copilot in PowerPoint going silent, a SharePoint and OneDrive incident Microsoft later said never happened, and Microsoft accidentally deleting Microsoft 365 data for some nonprofits that Microsoft says cannot be recovered. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

  6. Oct 5

    WinRAR Sells a $150 Bag, Citrix Zero-Days Hit, 16-Year-Old Owns Microsoft Admin, MS Damage

    WinRAR may have finally figured out how to get people to give them money, and it only took three decades. The answer wasn't licensing enforcement. It was a $150 messenger bag shaped like the WinRAR icon. Meanwhile, there are credible reports of two actively exploited Citrix NetScaler zero-days, a 16-year-old typed "admin" into a Microsoft analytics platform and got access to 17 trillion rows of data, and Microsoft's Weekly Damage Report is back with another seven days of broken things. This week, John and Logan cover four stories from the strange corners of cybersecurity, software economics, and ongoing Microsoft reliability. Stories in this episode: WinRAR finally gets paid. The company that has spent three decades politely asking people to pay for a software license apparently discovered the actual monetization strategy was always merchandise. WinRAR partnered with fashion brand Tern to release a $150 messenger bag shaped like the WinRAR icon. A single-user license costs about $29. People who refused to pay $29 for the software are apparently willing to pay five times that amount to physically walk around dressed as WinRAR. Citrix NetScaler zero-days hit. There are credible reports of two previously undisclosed remote code execution vulnerabilities in NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances, and that they may already be under active exploitation. Security firm watchTowr says it has high confidence that multiple unpatched NetScaler RCE vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild. Some administrators have reportedly been told to shut their NetScalers down, not patch them. 16-year-old owns Microsoft admin. A researcher named Faav found that Microsoft's internal Titan analytics platform validated JWT claims (tenant, audience, application ID, username) but did not actually verify the cryptographic signature. He created an unsigned JWT, changed the username field to "admin," and Titan mapped him to local user ID 1 with the Administrator role. That gave him SQL query access to analytics infrastructure containing an estimated 17 trillion rows across 17 ClickHouse databases, including Bing analytics. The bounty: $5,000. Microsoft's Weekly Damage Report. Office 2016 and 2019 perpetual licenses forgot they were paid for. Teams had a 49 minute connectivity incident. Teams Rooms calls dropped after 30 seconds on certain Poly Android devices. Word saved PDFs to SharePoint by quietly saving them to a local cache instead. Exchange Online could not reply or reply-all to Microsoft 365 Group messages. Copilot could not Copilot. And School Data Sync had a nearly five day education services outage. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

  7. Sep 28

    Flock Layoffs Begin, Windows Tracks You Without an Account, FCC Starts LoRa Civil War, MS Damage

    Flock Safety, the $8 billion license plate reader company, just launched a "voluntary" employee separation program while cities across the country cancel their contracts. Windows quietly assigns a persistent 64-bit device identifier even when you set up a local account. The FCC has accidentally started a civil war inside Meshtastic and MeshCore mesh networks. And Microsoft's second Weekly Damage Report covers what got fixed and what is still broken after Patch Tuesday. This week, John and Logan break down four stories covering surveillance, privacy, radio regulations, and the ongoing state of Windows. Stories in this episode: The Flock is getting smaller. WIRED reported that Flock has launched a voluntary employee separation program roughly twice as generous as previous severance offers. Communities are dropping the surveillance camera vendor faster than ever, with 93 city and county governments cutting ties in August alone. Boston abandoned Flock after a vendor error enabled nationwide data sharing that its contract had explicitly disabled. The Washington Post reported dozens of cases where officers were accused of misusing the system to search for wives, girlfriends, or former romantic partners. Windows tracks you without an account. A new open-source project called deGDID documents Microsoft's server-assigned 64-bit Device PUID, which Windows can obtain from Microsoft's infrastructure even on machines set up with a local account. A 2026 court case revealed that Microsoft possessed information associating one of these identifiers with URLs, timestamps, and IP addresses. The project does not claim to make Windows anonymous. It documents what this identifier does and offers a tested way to block and remove it. FCC starts a LoRa civil war. Meshtastic and MeshCore communities discovered that the default configurations most Americans use may not comply with FCC 47 CFR 15.247, which requires a minimum 6 dB bandwidth of 500 kHz. Meshtastic's Long Fast default is 250 kHz. MeshCore's default has been 62.5 kHz. Fixing this fractures the network effect that made the system useful in the first place. Microsoft's Weekly Damage Report. Remote Desktop Services, Hyper-V Linux folder sharing, and Active Directory trust were broken by September's Patch Tuesday and are now marked resolved. USB Audio Class 1.0 devices are only partially fixed. File History quietly stopped creating and updating backups with no fix yet. And a false "Defender is turned off" warning got officially resolved even though Defender was actually running the whole time. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

  8. Sep 21

    AI Faked 4,700 Soulmates, German Police Join Your Chats, Chess.com Leaked, Passkey Phishing

    A China-based operation used Claude to power more than 20 fraudulent dating apps and fake 4,700 AI "soulmates" for at least 25,000 real people. German police are quietly connecting their computers to citizens' WhatsApp accounts through phones handed over voluntarily. Chess.com just had 7.3 million records show up online. And attackers are now phishing Microsoft 365 accounts by pretending to help you set up a passkey. This week, John and Logan break down nine stories covering AI abuse, surveillance, data breaches, and Microsoft's newest weekly reliability problem. Stories in this episode: Your soulmate is running in a data center. According to Anthropic, a China-based operation used AI to power more than 20 fraudulent dating apps with thousands of fake personas interacting with at least 25,000 people. Claude Code helped build the apps. Claude powered the conversations. Roughly one in four accounts was a paid human worker taking video calls and following users on social media. The system generated about 2.36 million messages over two weeks and explicitly tracked which users were getting suspicious. German police add themselves to your chats. According to court records published by Netzpolitik, parents voluntarily handed over their phones so officers could read messages from their daughter. Officers also secretly connected the parents' WhatsApp accounts to a police computer. Returning the phones did not end the access. The capability became permanently available to investigative units in August 2025. Chess.com data leaked. A dataset with 7.3 million records and roughly 4.6 million unique email addresses showed up online in August. Have I Been Pwned found that 99% of the email addresses had appeared in previous breaches, which supports the theory that scrapers matched existing lists against Chess.com accounts. Microsoft 365 fake passkey phishing. Attackers are calling employees pretending to be IT support, claiming a passkey upgrade is required. In one observed approach, the attacker persuades the employee to enter a device code on Microsoft's real authentication page, which authorizes an attacker-controlled client. The passkey cryptography was not broken. The employee was. Plus AI giants like Dario Amodei calling for slower development and who actually benefits, Blockstream refusing to pay ransom after 4,000 bitcoin was drained from Liquid, Revolut handing customer data to attackers who spoofed a legitimate government email domain, a four-year sentence for a Conti ransomware member, and the first Microsoft Weekly Damage Report covering September's Remote Desktop, VPN, and Excel breakage. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
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About

Zero Downtime brings together tech, business, and the everyday experiences of running an IT company. John and Logan discuss what’s going on in their world, the questions people ask them most, and talk with other business owners and professionals in conversations that are real, relaxed, and worth your time.

Information

  • Creator
    John Hass
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Zero Downtime

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