Episode 64

In this episode, Matt and Cricket are joined by Renée Burton, Infoblox’s Vice President of Threat Intelligence. They briefly introduce Protective DNS and its advantages as a security mechanism, then talk about threat feeds and how they’re created, and finally discuss Renée’s team and their work on analyzing Passive DNS data and DNS metadata to detect–and in some cases predict–the malicious use of DNS. Toward the end, they segue (or perhaps “lapse”?) into a meandering discussion of Neal Stephenson’s “Polostan” (Cricket is, embarrassingly, stuck), Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series (which Matt recommends), von Neumann probes (which Cricket either had not heard of or did not remember, necessitating an explanation from Matt, and which illustrate John von Neumann’s incredible mind and remarkable versatility), “Silo” (because Cricket is still not over Rebecca Ferguson–see episode 63) and AppleTV+’s run of other worthwhile shows, including “Slow Horses,” “Bad Monkey,” and “For All Mankind.”