4. Roombas, Guns, and Money

Before the episode, Robin mentioned that she found a great certification for n00bs and career-switchers, IT Fundamentals+ (ITF+):

--CompTIA website: https://www.comptia.org/certifications/it-fundamentals

--Free full ITF+ course with ITProTV: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc6zqGSJMvCSQ3djLlfS_2LnliS-Q-FKV

Terms used:

DDOS Attack: a malicious attempt to reduce the target system's availability; often involves the use of botnets (see below)

DNS: Domain Name Service; aids Internet users by resolving plain-language URLs (such as www.securityzed.com) into the IP address of the machine hosting the intended content (the securityzed blog and podcast)

Botnet: a group of machines, often quite large (sometimes, thousands of devices), used to perform some less-than-legitimate activity (DDOS attacks, reporting inflated ad clicks/link calls to generate ad revenue, performing mathematical work to try to crack password/credentials/content that has been encrypted, etc.); typically, the owner of each device in the botnet is not even aware that their device is participating.

Internet of Things: Current trade name for consumer products that have an IP address but main purpose is to function in the physical world, not as compute/storage devices.

If you are a nerd and like physics, cats, and weaponized vacuums, check out William Osman on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7haDZWR3MYU

Brian Krebs, INFOSEC rockstar and the target of the giant Mirai attacks (as well as his hosting service, DYN), discussing all the topics associated with Mirai: https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/mirai-botnet/

SecurityWeek article about the Mirai attacks, which includes PornHub's DNS redundancies/mapping: https://www.securityweek.com/whats-fix-iot-ddos-attacks

A good background on what DNS is and how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hosting_service