Welcome to the Decipher podcast. I'm Dennis Fisher here with
Lindsay O'Donnell, Welch Linds. I think we actually made it
through a week without a giant vulnerability or targeted attack
or anything catastrophic happening.
Knock on wood, but yes, that's. Yeah, I think, oh, right, that's
true. It's not the weekend.
We have like 15 hours before. Yeah, things could still go
sideways. Yeah.
The, I think the biggest, like it wasn't a security event, but
the AWS outage took up a lot of people's time and energy this
week. I think I I paid a little bit of
attention to it, like everybody did.
But once I realized it wasn't security related, I was like,
Nah, I don't care. They'll they'll fix the Internet
at some point. I know I, I feel like those crop
up every, you know, few months or weeks where you know,
there's, there's an outage and then everyone realizes just how
interconnected everything is. And yeah I did see some
hilarious tweets about was it IoT connected like beds or
something weren't heating up properly or weren't like moving,
just first world problems. The first thing that came into
my head was like what in the hell have we done that?
Like people are getting like first degree burns because their
bed won't cool down because the cloud platform is out.
Like what? That's I think there are bigger
issues at play if that's really your biggest problem.
Honest to God in it, it was one of those things where like it
happened overnight for us, like, you know, US East Coast and I
kind of woke up and I don't, oh, I know exactly how I figured out
what had happened. I went to play Wordle and it
wouldn't work. And I was like, oh, there must
be a thing going on. And then, you know, noticed it
in some group chats or whatever. But that's like how how
interconnected and dumb the world is that you're just like
Oh my word game doesn't work and my bed might kill me and like my
oven won't Preheat remotely. It is funny like that's you
know, in in like the movies and when these types of things are
dramatized, like it's always like all the power shuts down
and like these are black and everything.
But like even like do you remember the Dan you know D Dos
attack in like 2017? That was because of the Mirai
bot Nets, like the cute DDoS attack like even that I, I
remember I found out about that because I couldn't log into
Netflix. I was just like, OK, this is
just, there's nothing critical happening from my end, you know,
as an everyday user, so. It's just funny.
Yeah. It was funny because it kind of
turned into like, almost a snow day for people, too, because,
like, my son who's in college texted me.
It was like, what the hell did Amazon do to the Internet?
I can't even do school work here.
And you know, he had like a bunch of laughing emojis and I
text him back. I was like, there's, I've told
you this, there's like 4 companies that run the Internet.
That's one of them. And when it breaks like this is
what happens. He's like, cool, I'm going to go
play golf. That's good reaction.
Yeah, it's every, every so often that meme pops up where it like
all the blocks are, you know? Yes.
Spiraling down to 1 little block and I've and sadly I've seen
that over and over with, you know open source security issues
and like you know just all these out like a critical
infrastructure and now just this so like it's.
Just. I think that there's a recurring
theme here, so. I can't even remember what the
original. I know it's from XKCD, but I
don't remember what the original like configuration of that comic
was. Like what's holding up the
entire Internet? It's probably something like
JavaScript or, you know, some dumb shit like that.
I can't remember what it was, but it's used over and over and
over whenever there's some kind of cascading failure like this
and the general public realizes that everything is being held
together, you know, by Silly Putty and you know, like 4
people in a data center in Seattle.
Exactly. Yeah.
That's, that's not going to change, I don't think.
Unfortunately, no. It's only going to get worse,
like consolidation. And yeah, we know.
All right, let's get to some actual security things.
So you wrote a story this week, Linds, about this Cyber Solarium
Commission report. They sort of come out with
these. I don't know if it's like a
regular cadence, but every few months or so they do some really
good work. Tell us about that one that
came. Out this week.
Yeah, that it, this is interesting to write about and
read because those were, the report basically comes from this
Commission, as you mentioned, the Cyberspace Solarium
Commission that was created I think like 6 or so years ago by
Congress to basically when the US was like, how can we, you
know, defend against really big cyber attacks?
And like, what do we need to do? Like we need like benchmarks and
like a step by step process to measure like how well we're
equipped to defend against these types of things.
So the Commission created 82 recommendations for how, you
know, different, basically different measures that the US
government could take across Congress, across, you know,
executive actions, all these different things like in also
like operationally, how its agencies operate, things like
that. And every year so far, the
report, there's been like a report basically that comes out
in matches and measures how the US government's doing using
these recommendations as a benchmark.
So you know, some of these things are like, you know,
strengthen SISA or like, you know, diversify workforce, yes,
improve cyber capacity building and consolidate the funding of
cyber foreign assistance things, things along that those lines.
So like you can imagine over the past year, just with like all
the craziness and chaotic nature of what's been happening that,
you know, in this past report that they came out with this
week, they found that some of the recommendations that had
previously been, you know, there a lot of progress had been made
towards those recommendations. Now we're kind of in reversal
and they're they basically said that there was a bit of a set
back in EU s s ability to protect itself from threats due
to things like SISA budget cuts and, you know, some other moves
that have been made over the past year.
Now, I do want to say that in the report, they found that some
of this, some of the things that they have seen over the past
year is just kind of the nature of, you know, things that
happened during presidential transitions, kind of par for the
course. Like there's going to be there's
going to be personnel turnover. There's going to be like a shift
in priority. And like that's just kind of
what happens. But I think, you know, they
pointed specifically to CISA, which you know, as we've seen in
the news recently has been going through a lot of budget cuts and
a lot of personnel cuts and then also a couple of other, a couple
of other concerns there as well. Yeah, it's, it's disheartening
to see these kind of things obviously because as we just
detailed talking about the AWS thing, everything relies on the,
you know, on the Internet in one way or another, whether you
think it's disconnected or, or it's not.
And we're at a point in, you know, human history where you
can't go backwards on these things.
You really do need to be making progress on a continual basis
because we have, you know, nation state adversaries who are
trying to do the same things we are and are also watching what
our defensive capabilities are and developing offensive
capabilities to exploit where they see weaknesses.
I mean, everybody talks about China and Russia and to some
degree North Korea and Iran in terms of their offensive
programs. And they're not, you know,
they're not slowing down, they're accelerating and in a
lot of cases are, are ahead of us in terms of some of these
offensive capabilities and the type of programs they're putting
in the field. So if we're going backward on
defense in some cases or in some, some key areas, it's, you
know, that's a, that's a real problem.
You know, outside of the CISA, the personnel things and all the
budget chaos here, our government is not operating at
the moment, which is always, you know, which is a crazy thing if
you, I don't know if you've had these conversations, but I have
friends that work in the government in DC or, you know,
have recently. We also have friends, you know,
and colleagues from other countries that are like, I don't
really understand. Your government just does not
work right now. No, Yeah.
They just, they just sent everyone home and said we'll pay
you later. It's almost impossible to
explain. It's so it's crazy, yeah.
I mean, and we talked about this in previous podcast too, but
like the impact that, you know, the current situation short term
is having on cybersecurity is really interesting to see play
out. But then as you mentioned, when
you look at other countries and the capabilities that they have
that that's really scary as well.
I mean, if you look at how China operates, like they're so
unified in terms of how different processes work
together. If you look at, you know, what
they're, you know, some of their rules are their standards for
vulnerability disclosure and things like that compared to how
you know other nations operate. And then you look at kind of
where we're at right now in terms of like our, the
operations that we currently have in place, it's, it's a
little disheartening. So, and the other thing too is,
you know, CISA, I would say does a lot of work behind the scenes,
both in within the government, but then also like they've
really done a good job in my personal opinion, like fostering
this like public private collaboration over the past few
years and like trying to reach out to those like less
resourced, you know, entities like, you know, that might be in
more of, you know, rural areas. So like trying to like go from
the ground up a little bit more there.
So I think there's just going to be a longer term impact there in
the private sector that hopefully won't be too big of a
hit, but we'll see. Yeah, there's no question about
it. We did mention this I think a
couple weeks ago when we were talking about some of the
specific cuts that had to do with funding for state, local
and tribal government programs, specifically around
cybersecurity, which you know those, those agencies tend not
to have large budgets and they don't have large personnel pools
with cybersecurity specific experience.
And it's really difficult for them to go and find and pay for
that, that expertise when they don't have the funding from the
federal government to do it. You know, the, the information
sharing part of it is great. And that's all well and good
when Cissa sends you a bunch of things and says, Hey, there's
attacks against this F5 bug or whatever it happens to be.
But if you're a small government agency in a, you know, in Nevada
and you're like, well, cool. But we don't have anybody to
help us actually do anything about that.
You know, we have Fred, the IT guy that runs everything for an
entire county and doesn't, you know, how is he going to go find
and patch every F5 box we have? But.
Yeah, Yeah, that's a really good point.
The other thing in the report that, you know, I wanted to get
your thoughts on too was the. So basically it made several
recommendations to help, you know, in the coming year, get us
back to where we need to be in terms of strengthening, you
know, different authorities and like getting more funding to
agencies. And obviously, you know, SISA
was was part of that as well as the State Department restoring
the workforce and funding there. They also mentioned elevating
the role of the office of the National Cyber Director.
I thought that was interesting because and kind of obvious, but
like, you know, we have so many different regulatory security
initiatives across the US and it's such like a patchwork and
fragment system. So that's, you know, over the
past few years, that's that's been top of mind for me at least
is like, you know, how to capture it basically like
encapsulate better unified, like security initiatives across the
country. And that was one thing that this
report kind of highlighted was needed, the need for the Office
of the National Cyber Director to have these elevated
privileges to be able to, you know, help do that.
I completely agree with that. I don't know.
The way that the federal government works is an absolute
opaque mystery to me, even though, you know, we all learned
about it in grade school and understand like the branches and
all that. But who does what when is is
still kind of mysterious. But that seems to me like a
position that should be essentially a cabinet level
position given the dependency of everything on the Internet or,
you know, however you want to classify it on, you know,
computer technology these days, networks, cyber security,
whatever you want to say that. I mean, how is that not as vital
as, you know, the kinetic defense or, you know, Department
of Treasury or things like that Department of Transportation
that are part of everybody's daily lives.
And as we see when something like the AWS outage happens or,
you know, the Mirai thing that you mentioned earlier, Linds,
people realize it when those things happen.
They don't realize it is part of their daily lives.
But you know, when their car won't update its software
because there's some sort of like cloud problem or, yeah,
your, your bed tries to kill you in the middle of the night, then
then you realize it. But I do feel like that is these
are essential things that are part of daily life and the
government needs to be paying as close attention to those as it
does to any of those other bits and pieces.
So elevating that to the highest possible level seems like a no
brainer to me. And it seems like something that
probably, but one of the other problems is we've had so many
different versions of that position over the years.
You know, there was like a cybersecurity czar at various
times, or there was this office or there's this office.
And there's so many different parts of the government that are
responsible for overlapping pieces of critical
infrastructure defense. And I do feel like it's in some
some ways sort of a game of telephone of like, OK, well,
who's in charge of this and who's responsible for that?
And who's going to do this, especially when we're in the
middle of this chaotic period that doesn't really seem to have
any end on the horizon with budget cuts and personnel cuts,
You know, at CISA, which everybody sort of points to, is,
and rightly so, is the flagship cybersecurity defense
organization for the federal government.
And they're being, you know, systematically gutted,
especially the cybersecurity portion of CISA over the last, I
guess what, seven months, six months now, whatever it is, it's
been and there's no real, I don't, I haven't seen any real
logic to those, to those reductions or any real game plan
in why they're doing this. And you know, it, it doesn't
seem like it's certainly not improving our defenses in any
way. So I I don't know.
That's. It's kind of a rambling answer
to your question, but. No, yeah.
And that's an interesting like one thing that sticks out to me
is like, now we're obviously seeing these, you know, these
cuts in in personnel, these cuts in workforce.
Like when it comes to security, is there going to be an explicit
way that we can measure like, oh, we had more cyber attacks
this year like we, you? Know.
I think it's going to be really hard and like, you know, one way
that it could be measured is, you know, maybe there's going to
be like, if any, like just with the the challenges right now
around, you know, public collaboration and having like
reporting, sharing, you know, ways to share and report about
security incidents. Like I almost wonder if we're
going to see less reported breach it.
Yeah, I don't know. I think it's going to be tough
like to figure out what the impact is going to be for this
and how, how to measure that. But yeah, I guess it's just
still to be seen. There's a couple of things there
that are pretty interesting to me.
One is the, IT in some ways reminds me of the way that
whenever there is a change in presidential administration,
they always sort of will weaponize things like jobs
reports and economic reports and be like, look how well we're
doing since we came into office or, you know, those sorts of
things. Even with like a sample size of
like 1/2 an hour, you know, and you have to take that with a
grain of salt. But the thing that you mentioned
of like are we going to, are these reporting mechanisms still
going to be in place where we're going to know about attacks that
have happened? That's a great question.
I don't, I don't really have an answer.
I mean, there are laws in place in in almost every state, I
think at this point that you need to report these and there
are regulatory things and all that kind of stuff.
And you can go look at the SEC filings, but the anecdotal
things that get sort of reported through CISA and other agencies
where a private organization will alert them to an ongoing
attack and then that gets disseminated.
I don't know because the I don't know if those, those information
sharing mechanisms are still going to be in place.
And it reminds me of the line that we see in every or in a lot
of breach disclosures and after action reports will those
they'll say something like we haven't found any evidence of.
Active exploitation or of you know, source code theft or XYZ,
whatever, whatever you want to put into there.
And everyone with any experience will be like, well, have you
looked or do you have the logs to tell you if this happened?
So if if six months from now somebody in the government
points to a thing and says look how much data breaches have gone
down since, you know, the beginning of 2025, you've got
really, have they or are we just not hearing about them, you
know? Yeah, I know it's like we could
do like a whole other podcast about, you know, stats and how
data is framed like that, especially in cybersecurity,
because there's always going to be a, you know, some sort of
back end context there, Especially when it comes to
incident reporting, because that's such a, there's so many
layers there, like are things being reported, like, you know,
what's happening on the back end and all these different things.
So yeah, it's really interesting.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure some of our stat nerd friends are like
screaming at their, you know, podcast players right now about
this stuff and like sample size and all kinds of other phrases I
don't want to hear about. But yeah, I, I think it's going
to be something to watch going forward.
That's it's a really good point you raised.
Yeah. So what was the other?
Oh, there was a couple of other things I wanted to mention that
you mentioned the F5 thing briefly that, you know, incident
that happened a few I guess two weeks ago now.
Gosh, yeah. With the F5 intrusion and and
sort of a supply chain attack, and I saw some reporting this
week sort of tied to the SISA thing.
We were just talking about how, you know, SISA put out the
emergency directive for the F5 thing.
Essentially what those say is, hey, agencies go find all these
F5 things and disconnect them if they're vulnerable or try and
patch them. And, you know, they're kind of
boilerplate and they happen all the time.
But some of the reporting, I think it was Cyberscoup
specifically went and kind of did a story and talked to some
former CISA folks and some Cisos that said, well, they didn't
actually know where all part of the reason that that emergency
directive went out is because they didn't know.
Well, all this F5 stuff was inside the federal government,
despite billions of dollars spent on these various programs
that are designed to know exactly where all these things
are inside these agencies, which, you know, it's just kind
of another, I don't know if data pointer is the right word, but
anecdotal anecdote. There we go in the, in the
timeline that shows it's not, you know, we're kind of taking
steps back here. You know, it's not to keep
beating this drum, but it is kind of more, you know, evidence
to the on that side of the fence that things are not going well.
Yeah, that was, that report was really interesting.
I didn't read too much into it. But so basically there was they
didn't understand like where the different assets were.
Is that what you're saying? Like, yeah, OK, yeah, it's not
great. No, it's not great.
I mean, an old cliche of like, you can't secure what you don't
know you have, which is, you know, one of my favorites.
But it's so true. It's a cliche for a reason.
You can't go and fix something if you don't know that you
actually own it. You know, we saw this so often
with things like the, you know, the SolarWinds attack was, you
know, one of the most obvious examples where tons of
organizations were like, no, we don't have that.
And then, you know, three days later, they're like, oh, we do,
yeah. Or you that.
Yeah, I, I feel like that's really interesting cuz like
asset inventory is like the number one basic thing that, and
the other thing is like these aren't like like, I guess
SolarWinds like you kind of were like, oh, that's something maybe
some people didn't know where it was, but like big IP appliances
like these are like historically targeted devices that you got to
know like. Right.
If you you, I would have assumed, like if I worked in any
government agency, I would have assumed that we had a bunch of
these somewhere. Like just by default, you know,
they almost certainly do. I can't imagine that there's any
government agency in, in DC that doesn't, you know, unless
they've like, ripped them out at some point.
But I mean, it's ubiquitous stuff.
But it's yeah. Yeah, that's not great.
No, it's not. It's not.
The other thing I wanted to just talk briefly about was like,
we've been doing these The Hacker Movie podcasts, which
have been super fun. The one we did this last this
past week that came out on Wednesday, Tuesday or Wednesday.
I think it was real genius, which I loved in your first time
watching that movie. And I got a lot of like, I don't
know if you did, but a lot of feedback from people that were
like, how had Lindsay never seen this movie?
It was so delightful, like listening to her talk about this
after having watched it for the first time.
Caring like an innocent child. Completely.
Yeah. You're like, there's a dude that
lives in the tunnels. I don't get it.
Yeah, that was great. I loved I.
What's funny is I I actually bought that movie, so I'm going
to go watch it again. Oh.
Hell yeah, I'd love that yes I own it for sure I own it on like
AI probably have a couple copies of it, but I just I rented it on
Amazon just for like convenience sake too just so I could watch
it but. Comfort movie.
It's so good. It's it's such a delight.
So if people haven't watched or listened to that episode, I
would encourage you to go check it out.
We had our friend Wendy Nether on, which is so great.
Just not just because Wendy is great, but she tells some really
incredible stories. She was part of the, I guess you
would call it hacker scene. I mean, she explains it, but in
the early 80s, early to mid 80s, that is sort of portrayed in
real genius. And she knew the woman who the
character of Jordan was was pretty loosely based on.
But she Wendy's just got some great sort of stories about that
time and some some explorations that they did that were pretty
funny. Her and her friends and yeah.
It was definitely some great background, I would say to the
movie. And I feel like you have, you
know, we've got a couple more of these in the pipeline, you know,
going down the road for in terms of picking other movies.
So if people have, you know, things that they want us to talk
about, specific movies or TV shows or anything, would love
to, we'd be open to it and want to continue this.
Yeah, absolutely. We have a spreadsheet with like
a very long list of of these movies and you know, we've done
sneakers and war games and real Genius already.
And there's a bunch of others that are, you know, considered
hacker movies, things like the Net and hackers, the Matrix,
things like that. But then, you know, the
definition gets a little looser after that with, you know,
things like Die Hard. And we do have Black Hat on
there, which is I don't have you ever seen that?
I think I have a while ago. Is that with Chris Hemsworth?
Yes, yes. I think I saw it a while ago.
Yeah, we need like a bad hacker movie like offshoot.
We're going to do that. I mean, we've done, we did all
of those. You weren't you weren't involved
in these, but we did a lot of these movies previously, me and
Pete Baker and Zoe Lindsay, usually with some some guests
like back in the day. And now we're we're redoing a
bunch of them. But we do have a long list and I
I sent that list to a bunch of our friends too and said, hey,
if you have, if you want to come on a on an episode, let me know.
And people added a couple of other movies like Superman 3,
which I'm there's no way on earth you've seen that movie.
There's no way OK you if you, if and when you watch it, you'll
understand why it's on there. But it's it's incredibly dated.
It's from like 1983, I think. But it's extremely goofy.
But there is, there is like a computer, computer aspect to it,
which is quite funny. But there's other ones, you
know, like Independence Day and like Catch Me If You Can, which
is a great social engineering movie, obviously.
Yeah, I was going to say all the social engineering movies like
Home Alone would be a good one. Around Christmas.
The Ferris Bueller's Day Off has some good stuff in there.
Yeah, catch what you can. So I I think all that stuff is
really fun. Yeah.
Oh, Ferris Bueller's common we got, we got a special episode on
that one. We've talked about that.
Yeah. Catch me if you can.
There was a it might have been probably right around the time
you started covering security. There was like a whole two to
three-year period where that guy Frank Abingnail was like he was
just available at every hacker conference.
He was out there like giving keynotes and things.
It might have been maybe a little before your time, I'm not
sure. But he was around like you would
see him at like Black Hat or things like that.
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's kind of funny.
You're just like, all right, buddy.
I mean, I'm all for everybody getting their money.
But like, once you've heard his stories about like, yeah, OK,
you impersonated there and, like, got it, Got it, Got it,
Yeah. That's yeah, sounds about right.
Sorry about your childhood. Yeah.
I feel like the there's also like some good TV shows too that
that are worth and I don't know, I feel like another cool thing
is like, you know, now with like AI, like, yeah, there's a lot of
movies that have like interesting philosophical takes
on AI and like machine learning and all that too.
And there's a little bit of a cybersecurity twist in it.
So I think that would be a cool angle to take to.
There's so many AI Movies Now, like just in the last probably
four years, we both watched this absolute trash movie called
Heart of Stone that has Gal Gadot and I can't even remember
who else but her just in front of a green screen AI thing for
90. It's absolute nonsense.
There could not have been a script.
I don't we'll we'll do that at some point, but there's a lot of
those, the most recent Mission Impossible movies too, all AI
based crap. But yeah, there's a lot of the
TV part of it. We we had talked about trying to
do something with Mr. Robot when that was still on, but we
couldn't really figure out a way to.
I mean, I guess now that it's been off the air, like the whole
series is completed and, you know, there's no real way to do
it episode by episode, but we could sort of talk about it in
general. Yeah.
You know, because there are people that we know who worked
on that show, which could be kind of fun to do.
It got pretty far away from the hacker stuff towards the end,
but. It did, yeah.
I think probably the first like 3 episodes would be the best for
that, but yeah, yeah. I remember when that started the
first episode where he's just like, I thought it was going to
be kind of hacker of the week, like, you know, kind of ACSI
thing where he was just going to go and take down, you know, like
sort of soft blackmail, you know, criminals.
And I was like, oh, this will be cool.
That sounds great, but it very clear, you know, very quickly
you're like, Oh no, that's not what this is at all.
This is real weird. This is some Doctor Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde type shit going on. Yeah, so good though.
It is. It's really good.
All right, before we go animal updates.
Yes, do. You do, I have.
Nope, don't have a dog yet, but some very important dog related
news. I was on a walk on the bike path
in my town a few days ago and there's tons of dogs in there
all the time, always stopping to pet them if they'll let me.
I met a little golden retriever puppy named Rigatoni.
Amazing name. I know.
I couldn't believe it because her owner kept calling her Tony.
And I was like, oh, that's her name's Tony.
And she said Rigatoni. It was this older woman, like in
her 70s, and she was so proud of it.
Like Rigatoni. She's like, yes, I'd love it.
It's incredible. A+ name.
I'm going to have to steal that when we get Future.
When we get her second dog, whenever that is.
Yeah, yeah. So no dog for me, but I did meet
Rigatoni, which is great. I loved him or her actually.
It was great. OK, on your end, you have a much
more concerning animal update. Yes, well, I, I, I was talking
to you on Twitter about this, but I, we basically had what we
thought was a squirrel in our bathroom.
And we discovered it 1:00 AM. It was in it literally in the
toilet, still alive. Alive.
Yeah. And we were like, that's, you
know, really weird, but whatever.
And by the way, so I didn't see this alleged squirrel in there.
So he was like, oh, it was a squirrel.
Like it had a bushy tail. The next night we we were just
watching TV, my husband and I and we look over and on the
couch across the room there was another squirrel that he thought
was a squirrel but Nope it was actually a rat.
It was not a squirrel. So we have a bit of a rat
infestation going on now. The tail was like slightly
furry, so I understood why he maybe thought it was a squirrel,
but I was, I took one look at it.
I was like, that is not a squirrel.
That that. And yeah, we saw, we saw that
one. We saw another one, the other,
you know, at like 1:00 AM the same night.
So yeah, it's. We're dealing OK, All right.
This is both more concerning and clears up a few things because I
couldn't figure out how a squirrel had a gotten into your
house and B would want to be in the toilet.
I didn't know that. Didn't make a lot of sense to
me. Squirrels are dumb, but like
they they wouldn't. I don't consider them aquatic
creature. I couldn't imagine why he would
be in the toilet and. I like literally like Speaking
of CSI, like spent half the day. I was like there we have like an
air vent on the ceiling. So I was like, maybe it jumped
from the ceiling down into the toilet.
Like, yeah, I like measured out all the holes.
I was just like how? Did.
Oh yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with that.
But the rat thing makes more logical sense.
Like from a animal perspective I can understand how a rat gets
into a house and specifically a toilet.
I guess I don't know if you guys have a septic tank or I'm the
sewer but if. Yes, we do.
OK, so the septic I don't know, but yeah, who knows?
Like, you know, we've had mice in our house.
Everybody get has mice in your house.
You're like, how do they even get in here?
I don't know. Who knows deal with mice.
I yeah, rats are different. This I'm going to next time I
see one, which I will, I'm going to take a picture of it and
I'll, I'll post it on Twitter and people, yeah, please sells.
But I mean, I thought it was a rat.
You know, my husband still is like, I don't know a squirrel,
but I I definitely think it's not a squirrel, but it looks,
but it's like a mat, a mouse rat basically like.
It's but it has a tail. Do you oh, do you think it's a
vole? Have you ever seen one of those?
I so I that was one of my options.
I looked it up and I don't think it's a vole.
It has like the body of a mouse, like a very big mouse, but then
not like a rat tail. It's like a, it's like a furry
tail. I'm so confused by this.
So it's it's too bad this isn't a video episode.
Our faces are just like too much.
I have maybe one of our honest nurses got some thoughts on
this. There'll probably be like 40
people that'll be like, hey, dummies, it's this.
But I can't think of anything. I was going to have some
questions for your husband about.
Like squirrels and rats don't really look all that much alike
at all. That's that's why I was like,
that's, that's a rat. That's not a squirrel.
That's a rat, yeah. I'm not, I'm not afraid of
squirrels at all. I mean that they're stupid and I
don't like them, but like rats, I wouldn't say I'm afraid of
them, but I don't want to be anywhere near them.
Like they're like, if you've ever walked down like in New
York City street or whatever, and you just see one and they're
black and just like, this is the most disgusting creature on
earth. I, yeah, I, I so I did, I looked
at more pictures. I think the closest I could see
if people go look up this on their phone is a pack rat
because it kind of has like the body of a mouse, but then it has
like a tail that's a little furry.
So. But then I saw that they're not
really native to Massachusetts, which is where I'm based, so.
I have to be honest, I'm not sure.
I did not know that a pack rat was a real thing.
I thought a pack rat was just like somebody who collects a
bunch of shit that they don't need.
It's an actual. OK, I know a.
Lot about rats right now. I've done extensive research. 48
hours. Oh my.
God this is the nightmare. My you know my wife.
She would have sold our house in 1/2 an hour.
Yes, I did. Not, but you just moved into
your house, yeah. It's we set up so many traps
like we, we haven't called an exterminator, but we're going to
see how, you know, last night went and they actually didn't
appear again last night. This was two nights ago that all
this happened and went down but. I assume you have not informed
your children of this. Have they seen this thing?
OK. We caught one on on sticky tape.
I I don't know if like I'm going to get cancelled for talking
about the ways that. These I have glue traps.
Get out of here with that. But so we, we kind of like hid
that from them. But yeah, they're they're
blissfully unaware right now. That's good.
Yeah. I told you we had like, this is,
we've been in our house a very long time, like 15, almost 20
years ago probably. We had a bat in our house.
We. No.
Oh, yeah, I, we have a ceiling fan in our bedroom.
I woke up in the middle of the night one night and looked up
and I, you know, just kind of rolling over and I saw something
just flying around the ceiling fan.
I was in the middle of the summer and just saw it.
And I was like, Oh my God. And the like, the only thing
people know about bats is that they're like, they follow
motion, right? So I was like, that's got to be
a bat. I turn on the light.
I was like, Oh my God, turn the light back off real quick.
Like kind of woke my wife up and was like, don't freak out.
But and you know, she somehow like didn't freak out and got
out of the room. We both got out of the room and
I opened the bedroom window and then we just left the room and
eventually didn't see the bat anymore.
But for like weeks after that. Or because you read so anything
online and they're just like, Oh no, they could be hiding in your
walls. They can they can squish down
into the size of like, you know, a tiny little thing and crawl
into. I was like just kept waiting for
it to. Yeah, exactly.
You feel. Like itchy like that.
Oh, I know. Yeah.
But there's like a million ways that a back can get in your
house, apparently. Like, it's not usually through
an open window. It's probably your attic or
something like that, which totally makes sense.
Went and checked out the attic, did all that.
But yeah, that was not a fun like 4 hours, like 2 in the
morning and. The worst part is when you have
to go in there and you're like, you have to make sure that it's
gone and you're you go in and you're like, is it gone?
Oh, yeah. And they will.
As I discovered, it was like sitting on like, the curtains by
the wind. You just like, oh, yeah.
And our kids were really young at the time, so it was just, you
know, we didn't tell them till much later in their lives.
Oh, that's so gross. Yeah, it was not great, not
ideal, but yeah, maybe you send. We should post a picture of
whatever it is that you eventually find.
I need to do it. I'm going to keep my phone handy
in case I come. Across.
I'm sure I want to see it for sure.
Yeah. I'm a little like, I'm really
confused by your husband's assessment of it as a squirrel.
Maybe it was just like hopeful. Oh yeah, it's just a squirrel.
It's fine. I.
Think it was just like hopeful wishing.
Yeah, exactly. Wish casting.
Yeah, it is totally harmless. Yeah.
Oh God. OK, well, that's been Animal
Corner with Dennis and Lindsay anyway.
OK, that was fun. We'll we'll keep everyone
updated on the wildlife and also security.
So, yeah. And have a good weekend all.
Right, you too see. Ya, bye.