Critical Point War Stories with Kevin Riggle

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-incide...

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/titl...

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 Mastod...

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/pr...

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 podca...

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...

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: 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 contributio...

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: 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...

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 & outr...

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/lopeztim...

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/lope...