DtSR Episode 729 - Xavier Ashe 1 A.M. at Sprint: The Night Yahoo Went Down

Show notes

TL;DR: Xavier Ashe was there when that first DDoS attack by MafiaBoy went down. He's got stories, and we're going to tell them. Recorded live at BSides Atlanta in 2026.

Guest

Xavier Ashe

Description: A DDoS attack used to be something you could “just block” once you saw the source. Then defenders learned the hard way that thousands of small senders can knock over a giant, and the playbook changed for good. From the stage at B-Sides Atlanta at Georgia Tech, we sit down with security veteran Xavier Asht for story time from the defender’s seat during one of the earliest recorded distributed denial-of-service incidents and what that night still teaches security operations teams today.

From there, we follow the thread into the modern SOC: the messy gap between “something is broken” and “we are under attack,” the endless tooling arms race, and why AI makes some problems easier while creating brand new trust issues. We talk candidly about non-deterministic systems, why “AI will triage everything” keeps falling apart in practice, and how AI may be most useful when it helps glue together fragmented enterprise data the pain point SIEM tools have tried to solve for decades.

We also shift to the human side of cybersecurity: neurodiversity in the workplace, why so many of us feel more at home in hacker spaces than in “normal” environments, and how strengths like hyperfocus can be a superpower only in the right context. We close with a grounded five-year outlook on AI economics, regulation, and what happens when today’s cheap access meets real-world business pressure.

Subscribe for more conversations from the Security Rabbit Hole, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review so more defenders can find it.

Have something to say? Let's hear it.

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DtSR Episode 728 - Wes Widner - Unlocking Open-Weight Models

TL;DR: Xavier Ashe was there when that first DDoS attack by MafiaBoy went down. He's got stories, and we're going to tell them. Recorded live at BSides Atlanta in 2026. Guest Xavier Ashe Description : A DDoS attack used to be something you could “just block” once you saw the source. Then defenders learned the hard way that thousands of small senders can knock over a giant, and the playbook changed for good. From the stage at B-Sides Atlanta at Georgia Tech, we sit down with security veteran Xavier Asht for story time from the defender’s seat during one of the earliest recorded distributed denial-of-service incidents and what that night still teaches security operations teams today. From there, we follow the thread into the modern SOC: the messy gap between “something is broken” and “we are under attack,” the endless tooling arms race, and why AI makes some problems easier while creating brand new trust issues. We talk candidly about non-deterministic systems, why “AI will triage everything” keeps falling apart in practice, and how AI may be most useful when it helps glue together fragmented enterprise data the pain point SIEM tools have tried to solve for decades. We also shift to the human side of cybersecurity: neurodiversity in the workplace, why so many of us feel more at home in hacker spaces than in “normal” environments, and how strengths like hyperfocus can be a superpower only in the right context. We close with a grounded five-year outlook on AI economics, regulation, and what happens when today’s cheap access meets real-world business pressure. Subscribe for more conversations from the Security Rabbit Hole, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review so more defenders can find it. Have something to say? Let's hear it. Support the show >>> Please consider clicking the link above to support the show! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= YouTube home: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyo0dkKRvfVtWXjRxNISrhme1MgBj3C2U&si=scHDiTuLXSEQ9qHq LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/down-the-security-rabbithole-podcast/ X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/dtsr_podcast