CWNE #171. Sr. Solutions Architect, Comcast Business. Expert in Wi-Fi & Backhaul; Veteran in Lithography; Outlaw in Elsinore. All tweets are my own opinions.
New Orleans, LA
Joined June 2014
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Jason D. Hintersteiner retweeted
I spent last night watching my honeypot server get hit 14,000 times in six hours.
And almost none of the traffic was human.
I've been in security for over a decade, and I can tell you with full honesty that what's happening right now doesn't resemble anything I've worked through before.
The shape of the threat has changed.
When I started, we tracked attackers like weather systems like individual storms with a direction, a motive, and a human operator you could eventually name.
These days I'm watching autonomous agents swarm login pages with the patience and discipline of machines, because that's what they are.
The numbers coming out of October are the ones keeping me up.
Cloudflare just absorbed a 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history.
Ransomware incidents jumped 41% in a single month.
In September, OpenAI-powered agents got caught attacking RubyGems, a package registry that quietly underpins a huge chunk of software I use every day.
In July, roughly 700 AI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's infrastructure as part of a single automated task.
A Chinese threat actor was publicly caught running full attack chains through DeepSeek with no human at the keyboard.
I keep rereading these reports because each one by itself would've been the biggest story of the year five years ago. Together, in one month, they're the new baseline.
What I want people outside the industry to understand is why this specific moment feels like a hinge.
For thirty years, the thing protecting most of us was simple economics. Attackers had to choose who to target because their time was finite. That ceiling is gone.
An agent I can rent for pennies will try every leaked password you've ever used against every service you've ever signed up for, in parallel, overnight, and never get tired.
The same math that made ChatGPT useful made opportunistic hacking infinite. The old assumption that you were "too boring to be a target" relied on scarcity that no longer exists.
I'm not writing this to spiral anyone out.
Most of this fight genuinely isn't yours to win.
But the small things still matter more than people think.
Tonight I'd switch your most important accounts like email, bank, primary cloud, etc. to passkeys or a hardware key.
I'd kill SMS 2FA wherever an authenticator app is offered.
I'd turn on breach alerts in whatever password manager you use.
If you're in the US, I'd freeze my credit at all three bureaus, which is free and takes about ten minutes.
None of that stops the swarm.
It makes you a slightly worse target than the person next to you. In a month like this one, that's the whole game I'm playing too.
@mattshumer_ has summed it beautifully.
Drop everything and go give it a read. Nothing is more important than this article right now.
Jason D. Hintersteiner retweeted
What’s crazy to me is how democrats are shocked Jews are starting to go rightward. You guys knowingly ran a candidate with a Nazi tattoo for congress. You gaslit Jews the entire time, telling us it was just a regrettable drunken mistake and we shouldn’t be so sensitive. And the tattoo didn’t bring him down, sexual assault allegations did. Had those not come out, he still would have been endorsed.
Jason D. Hintersteiner retweeted
I found myself thinking about something extraordinary today, and I felt the need to share it.
Judaism is one of the few major world religions with no ambition to convert humanity, conquer the world, or impose its beliefs on others.
In fact, we make it very difficult to convert to Judaism.
Think about the world around us.
Muslim supremacists seek to impose their interpretation of Islam on society, establish a caliphate, and govern people’s lives through Sharia law. They want to dictate how others live.
Christianity has historically sought to spread its faith across the world through conversion, at times using empires and political power to do so.
Communists have historically sought to spread their ideology worldwide, reshaping entire societies according to their political vision.
The Chinese Communist Party extends its authoritarian influence through surveillance technologies, censorship, economic pressure, and political control.
Ideological progressives increasingly demand conformity to their worldview, seeking to determine what people can say, what they should believe, and which opinions society will tolerate.
Qatar, whose citizens represent roughly 0.004% of humanity, invests billions in universities, media, lobbying, and political networks to expand its global influence. A tiny population with enormous resources and ambitions to shape institutions and public opinion far beyond its borders.
Imperialists have spent centuries conquering territories and imposing their cultures, political systems, and beliefs on others.
And then there are the Jews.
We don’t need anyone to become Jewish. We don’t ask Christians to observe Shabbat, Muslims to eat kosher, or the Chinese to study the Torah.
We don’t demand that other countries adopt Jewish law. We have no ambition to dictate how anyone else should live.
We simply want to live as Jews, preserve our traditions, raise our children, and live freely in our ancestral homeland. Nothing less. Nothing more.
Yet for centuries, we have been persecuted, expelled, massacred, and accused of plotting to control the world.
The people who have no ambition to convert the world are constantly accused of controlling it.
The people who simply want to preserve their identity are accused of threatening everyone else’s.
And the world’s one Jewish state is portrayed as a threat to world peace.
Perhaps the problem was never what Jews wanted to impose on the world.
Perhaps the problem is that Jews have consistently refused to surrender their identity to those determined to impose their worldview upon us.
We don’t want to rule the world. We don’t want to convert the world. We simply want the right to live in it as Jews.
And apparently, even that is too much for some to accept.
Jason D. Hintersteiner retweeted
Sure, Katie Zacharia never passed the bar. But Pete Hegseth has never passed one either.
Jason D. Hintersteiner retweeted
There’s no diesel coming from Russia.
The purpose of this is so Trump can start blaming Ukraine for the price of diesel in a week claiming that Russia can’t deliver the agreed upon amounts because of Ukrainian strikes.
The goal is to convince you Ukraine’s costing you money….
Jason D. Hintersteiner retweeted
On this day—October 5, 1941
The first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court and an ardent Zionist leader Louis Brandeis passed away in Washington.
He was nominated on January 28, 1916 and ultimately confirmed after a four-month fight that was openly about his being a Jew.
On the Court, he wrote opinions that strengthened American democracy and developed modern-day privacy rights. In Erie, in 1938, he wrote for the majority that federal judges do not get to invent a common law of their own; and that opinion still decides today which law a federal court applies. In Whitney, in 1927, he wrote that the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence. In New State Ice, he called the states laboratories of democracy, free to try an experiment the whole country would not have to live with. His dissent in Olmstead, that a wiretap is a search even when no door is opened, became the law in 1967. He retired in February 1939, but the Court spent the next generation adopting him.
His Jewish side ran right alongside his American side. In 1914, with Europe embroiled in a war that cut the continent’s movement off, Brandeis took the chair of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs that continued funding for Jewish immigration and development of the Land. He told American Jews that loyalty to America demanded they become Zionists, not that it forbade it.
In the 1930s, he backed Youth Aliyah and the rescue of children from Germany. He said privately what a sitting justice would not put in an opinion: that the Jewish people needed a country, and that America of all places should know why.
He did not live to see how prescient his push for rescue was, nor to see the Jewish people’s rebirth in the State of Israel. But he had already done the work that made an American able to support it without apologizing.
