Transcript

AT&T Outage · CYBR.Signal

0:00
SPEAKER_00: And hello, everybody.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: Happy Cyber Sunday.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: Hope you're doing well.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: Wanted to talk about what a lot of people are talking about this last week, which was the big mobile phone, cell phone, cell service outage.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: It affected, seems like mostly ATT, had uh some downstream effects, looks like, on other services, but they got their stuff fixed a lot quicker.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there were several hours of outage starting early morning on um, I guess that was on well, just a few days ago.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to remember all the timeline, but um it happened early morning and lasted throughout a lot of the day.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: So the explanation that came back from AT ⁇ T is that they were doing some planned expansion of their network in just in certain areas.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: And that just at the outset seems plausible to me, not just because generally it is a plausible explanation, but anecdotally, what I experienced is I had some family that were up in uh north of the county that we live in in Texas, that's basically the county that where Houston is, is Harris County.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: And we've got Montgomery County above us, and I had, and we're real close to that border of Harris and Montgomery County where we live, but I had uh my wife and my daughter were up north of that in Montgomery County, and they didn't experience any outage.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: I was home in Harris County, experienced the outage.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Then when I went up there to where they were in Montgomery County, my phone cleared up, and then my daughter came back home back into Harris County, if you're following all this geography, and she consequently had started having problems after that.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: And obviously, just they were we were connected, or she was connected to our Wi-Fi at the house, so she was fine, but we saw the problem.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: So it definitely would look like it could have been some expansion in certain major geos that caused the problems.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, there's a whole lot of people who I don't know if they jumped to the conclusion, but they just asked the question was this a cyber attack?
2:25
SPEAKER_00: And you know, some people kind of were like, wow, you shouldn't ask that question, or you know, quit jumping to conclusions.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't think most of the people I read were jumping to conclusions somewhere, but others were just asking the question.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a very plausible question and or a good question and a plausible scenario as well, because if you are going to have attacks like that, maybe some of those attacks would be consecrated, concentrated in major geos like where I live.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: So I don't necessarily see that as a bad question to ask.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't see that at all as a bad question to ask.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: And I know some of that's being investigated according to some news stories I read that they just want to make the determination that it wasn't a cyber attack.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: And ATT's coming back and saying it wasn't.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: They gave the explanation.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: They haven't gone into detail.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: I hopefully we'll see more of that detail.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: And coming from a network background, I absolutely can see that happening with BGP and the complication that goes with that, and just all kinds of different getting anything on any scale, uh, the networking gets extremely complicated, the configurations get extremely complicated.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: I can see it happening, we've seen it in the past.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: But the point of some of this, though, is even if it wasn't a cyber attack, I really liken this to kind of if if you know anything about back in 2021 and us in Texas, or we in Texas call it the uh snowpocalypse.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: And we had a really bad snowstorm that came in around Valentine's Day, and it shut pretty much the whole state down, shut the grid down.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: And I I kind of liken those the same way.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: Neither, most likely, was a cyber attack.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: I know snow apocalypse wasn't, ATT probably wasn't either.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: But what it does do is highlight the fragility of some of this infrastructure that we have that we depend on every day, and it's something we've got to consider as cybersecurity professionals and just our daily lives as regular people, is if if we don't harden these things and use these lessons to take or use these events to learn lessons and to consider them into how we plan things out, and especially from a cybersecurity perspective, we get into this leave the world behind scenario.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: If you've seen that latest movie, where things just cause I mean, people just don't know what to do.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: You've got all these modern conveniences and you don't know what to do.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you get people who are really worried and scared about this because they didn't know what was happening, and you see all of these dramatizations of things that could happen, and you get scared.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: It's just kind of a natural cycle that tends to happen these days.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: So I guess that's the ultimate point of this is I don't think this was a cyber attack.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: It could have been, but I don't think it was.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: I think they have a plausible explanation.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: It makes sense based on the anecdotal evidence that I have.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: Cyber attack also makes sense, but I it seems more likely, um, you know, Occam's razor type of thing, that this probably wasn't that.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: But that and the snowpocalypse that we endured here a couple of years ago, three years ago, all of that highlights the fragility of the system.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: And as cybersecurity professionals, we should take that into consideration and make sure we do our due diligence in planning these things out and having ways of recovering from them quickly and dealing with them while they're still happening, especially if it's in an extended timeframe.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: So that's it.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Let me know what you think.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: Really interesting stuff.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: Talk to you next time.