Cloudflare Outage, Holiday Fraud Risks and Wind-Farm Crypto-Mining Case

Summary

The hosts discuss Cloudflare’s outage, which the company attributed to a database-permissions change rather than a cyberattack, share holiday fraud precautions, and report a wind-farm manager’s punishment for secretly installing crypto-mining equipment.

Key points

• The hosts say Cloudflare’s outage began at 11:20 UTC on November 18 and affected many Cloudflare-protected sites.
• Cloudflare attributed the outage to a database-permissions change that created duplicate entries in a bot-management feature file, making it unusable; the company said the outage was not a cyberattack.
• The hosts mention a 15.72-terabit-per-second DDoS attack attributed to the Isuru botnet and Microsoft’s claim that it blocked the attack, while treating a connection to the Cloudflare outage as speculation.
• For holiday payments, the hosts recommend tap-to-pay and caution against letting a payment card leave the customer’s sight.
• They advise checking shopping sites independently and avoiding suspicious deal emails and shortened links; they recommend using known URLs for banks and retailers.
• According to a report from Bitdefender, a Dutch wind-farm technical manager received 120 hours of community service for secretly installing crypto-mining equipment at two sites while the company was recovering from ransomware; he also had to pay more than €8,000 in damages.

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