Stake and Rope

Goat Security
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  • TECHNOLOGY

A satirical roundtable podcast reacting to real tech news. Each week, three of a recurring bench show up: maybe the burned-out SRE who's stopped being surprised, maybe the legacy sysadmin who's seen this before in a previous decade, maybe the paranoid CISO measuring second-order effects, maybe the founder who can spin any disaster into a thread, maybe the DBA who is contemptuous of work but not people. Others rotate in as the story calls for them. The retired sysadmin turned goat farmer sits in regardless.

Episodes

  1. Stop Being Surprised

    11H AGO

    Stop Being Surprised

    Brian Krebs published a piece on April 30th about Huge Networks, a Brazilian DDoS protection firm whose own infrastructure was used to launch a sustained botnet campaign against small Brazilian ISPs. The botnet was a Mirai variant running on compromised TP-Link routers. The exposed file archive included private SSH keys belonging to the firm's CEO, Erick Nascimento. Nascimento told Krebs the activity was the work of a competitor trying to tarnish his company's image, and that he has strong evidence stored on the blockchain of who did it, but he won't share the evidence because it would lose the surprise factor. The Legacy Sysadmin opens by pointing out this is the fourth time this exact story has surfaced in nine years. The original Mirai authors turned out to co-own a DDoS mitigation firm in 2017. A May 2025 incident traced to the same Brazilian operator hit Krebs's own site with a 6.3 terabit attack. The FBI seized several DDoS-for-hire services run by that operator. And now Huge Networks. Same country in three of the four. Same business model in all four. The Paranoid CISO declines to speculate about attribution and instead works through what the artifacts in the archive actually show. The Startup Founder steel-mans the CEO's defense as far as it can go, and discovers that's not very far. The Goat Farmer's Counsel notices that he doesn't miss this part. Source Article: "Anti-DDoS Firm Heaped Attacks on Brazilian ISPs" by Brian Krebs, KrebsOnSecurity, April 30, 2026. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/04/anti-ddos-firm-heaped-attacks-on-brazilian-isps/ The panel: The Legacy Sysadmin, The Startup Founder, The Paranoid CISO, The Goat Farmer's Counsel.

    11 min
  2. Distribution Unlocked

    11H AGO

    Distribution Unlocked

    App intelligence firm Appfigures published a report finding that image-model launches drive 6.5 times more app downloads than chatbot upgrades. Google's Nano Banana added 22 million downloads to Gemini in 28 days. ChatGPT's image generator added 12 million. The findings were widely reported as evidence that image AI is the new top of the funnel for consumer AI products. The revenue numbers, in the same report, told a different story. Nano Banana generated $181,000 in consumer spending over the same window. ChatGPT generated $70 million. Meta AI generated effectively nothing. The Startup Founder opens by celebrating the download numbers as proof that distribution is unlocked. The panel works through what that framing leaves out. The Burnt-Out SRE walks through what 22 million installs in a month actually looks like at the infrastructure layer — the inference cost, the queue depth, the pager schedule, the unit economics of serving a free product to a hundred thousand new users a day. The Legacy Sysadmin places the chart in a forty-year arc of identical-shaped growth curves attached to products that turned out to be free promotional services rather than businesses. Source article: "Image AI models now drive app growth, beating chatbot upgrades" By Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, May 4, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/image-ai-models-now-drive-app-growth-beating-chatbot-upgrades/ The panel: The Startup Founder, The Burnt-Out SRE, The Legacy Sysadmin, The Goat Farmer's Counsel.

    11 min
  3. Working Correctly

    11H AGO

    Working Correctly

    Microsoft Defender pushed a signature update on April 30th that flagged DigiCert's root certificates as malware. For about ninety minutes, enterprise endpoints across the internet started removing the certificates that validate roughly half of public web traffic. The signature update was, in Microsoft's framing, working as designed. The panel works out what "working as designed" actually means in this context. The Legacy Sysadmin places it in a thirty-year arc of antivirus software taking down the systems it was supposed to protect. The Burnt-Out SRE walks through what the incident looked like at 3 AM from inside a NOC. The Paranoid CISO declines to reach for a nation-state attribution and instead names the actual problem: the threat detection vendor and the certificate authority are both root-trust holders, and there is no audit layer underneath either of them. Source article: "Microsoft Defender wrongly flags DigiCert certs as Trojan:Win32/Cerdigent.A!dha" By Sergiu Gatlan at BleepingComputer, April 30, 2026. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-defender-wrongly-flags-digicert-certs-as-trojan-win32-cerdigentadha/ The panel: The Legacy Sysadmin, The Burnt-Out SRE, The Paranoid CISO, The Goat Farmer's Counsel.

    11 min
  • 3 Episodes

About

A satirical roundtable podcast reacting to real tech news. Each week, three of a recurring bench show up: maybe the burned-out SRE who's stopped being surprised, maybe the legacy sysadmin who's seen this before in a previous decade, maybe the paranoid CISO measuring second-order effects, maybe the founder who can spin any disaster into a thread, maybe the DBA who is contemptuous of work but not people. Others rotate in as the story calls for them. The retired sysadmin turned goat farmer sits in regardless.

Information

  • Creator
    Goat Security
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Dennis Koch
  • Show Website
    Stake and Rope