Rob Smith

🚀 Managing Director @Techzura
☁️ Cloud | 🤖 AI | 🔑 Security
Building IT & Security that just works.

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says "markets closing at the end of the day is a legacy design choice."

"Tokenization opens the door to a system that looks more like the internet itself."

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

JLR's IT is flickering back to life, with phased restarts and invoices finally flowing to those hanging-on suppliers. Factories stay dark till October. Reckon this'll finally nudge big firms to beef up their backups/DR? 👀

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

Follow up https://t.co/1Tn6cv3cDo

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

1/3 Well, it's the 24th, and JLR's factories are still in limbo after that cyber hit. They've pushed the restart to October 1 now, with suppliers hanging by a thread and the government mulling over buying up parts to save jobs. Bloody frustrating, but at least it's sparking chats on better resilience. 👀

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

Seeing JLR's cyber mess drag on like this, with factories dark for weeks and suppliers teetering on bankruptcy, it's a gut punch for the real folk in the supply chain, those small outfits laying off half their staff just to survive.

I've dealt with enough breaches to know, if your DR plan lets an attack cripple live ops, backups, and recovery, it's not fit for purpose, plain and simple. A giant like JLR should have air-gapped, tested failover, not this scramble that's costing £5m a day and risking 100,000 jobs. Frustrating how basics get overlooked when it matters most.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

3/3 Rumors point to something like Scattered Spider or a Lapsus$-style crew behind it, blending social engineering with ransomware flair. A reminder that even giants need air-gapped essentials and vendor drills. Stay sharp out there.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

1/3 Well, it's the 24th, and JLR's factories are still in limbo after that cyber hit. They've pushed the restart to October 1 now, with suppliers hanging by a thread and the government mulling over buying up parts to save jobs. Bloody frustrating, but at least it's sparking chats on better resilience. 👀

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

2/3 Reports say data got nicked too, and with no cyber insurance sorted in time, JLR's footing the whole bill, could be hundreds of millions by the end. Ouch. I've seen enough breaches to know skipping that policy is like driving without a seatbelt, thrilling until it isn't. What's your backup for the backups?

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

Something no one tells you when you decide you want to become an engineer.

One day, you’ll be standing in a data centre battling a cardboard box that refuses to die.

Unboxing and wrestling packaging into the bin somehow took longer than racking the actual servers. Living the dream. 😂

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

Update on that Collins Aerospace ransomware mess, ENISA's confirmed it, and airports are still reeling with manual check-ins turning terminals into a bloody circus. People stuck in hour-plus queues, Brussels axing 60 flights, all because one vendor's breach grounded Europe. Will be interesting to how this one plays out.

[Reuters @Reuters]

A ransomware attack caused recent disruptions to automated airport check-in systems, the EU’s cybersecurity agency said, highlighting growing risks to critical infrastructure https://t.co/76a5X1hrFh

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

3/3 Looks like Collins’ MUSE check-in got whacked, airports fell back to manual. Not nation-ending, just travel-ruining. Dependency mapping isn’t sexy, but neither is sleeping on the floor at T4. 😆

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

1/3 Heathrow, Brussels, Berlin… all doing manual check-in because a shared system got popped. One supplier, many airports, one giant queue. Single point of failure strikes again. What’s your plan B when the tablets say no? 🧐

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

2/3 Today’s lesson in resilience: when the fancy kiosks die, paper tags and people keep flying. Tech is brilliant, until it isn’t. Do your vendors practice failover with you, or just send PDFs? 👀

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

Indestructible, huh? Try a gentle nudge onto a gravel driveway. It's like the phone's Achilles heel, but with more satisfying crunch.

[Rjey @RjeyTech]

What's the iPhone AIR made of?

This phone is indestructible.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

3/3 At 19 and 18, respectively, the pair confronting these charges represents a heartbreaking diversion of potential, channeling skills into disruption that echoes for years, even as the system holds them accountable for the damage done. A tough pivot from promise to peril.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

1/3 Diving deeper into the Scattered Spider saga, both Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers now face UK charges specifically tied to the 2024 cyber attack on Transport for London (TfL), which disrupted services and racked up £39 million in recovery costs alone. This follows their arrests earlier this week as part of the broader U.S.-UK crackdown on the group's intrusions. Notably, while Jubair faces separate U.S. federal charges for over 120 hacks, Owen does not appear to have any U.S. indictments yet, at least as it stands.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

1/4 Just finished reading the DOJ announcement on Thalha Jubair, a 19 year old UK national charged in connection with multiple cyber attacks targeting U.S. businesses and critical infrastructure. As part of the Scattered Spider group, he and others conducted over 120 intrusions, extorted millions, and even targeted court systems 😵.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

2/3 The TfL breach, which happened in September 2024, involved social engineering tactics to infiltrate the network, leading to data theft and operational chaos across London's transit system. Flowers was first nabbed for it last year but released on bail; now both teens are charged under the Computer Misuse Act for conspiracy and unauthorized access. It's one piece of their alleged 120+ hacks, but a stark example of real-world fallout

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

4/4 This case underscores the need for stronger cybersecurity measures across the board, from better phishing awareness to robust defenses. What steps are you taking to stay secure online?

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

1/4 Just finished reading the DOJ announcement on Thalha Jubair, a 19 year old UK national charged in connection with multiple cyber attacks targeting U.S. businesses and critical infrastructure. As part of the Scattered Spider group, he and others conducted over 120 intrusions, extorted millions, and even targeted court systems 😵.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

3/4 Facing up to 95 years in prison at only 19 years old is a staggering prospect, essentially a real life sentence. It's a stark reminder of how quickly wrong paths can lead to irreversible forever lasting consequences.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

3/3 Customers deserve genuine real-world tests, not just marketing spin from vendors. This lack of transparency is frustrating, who's next to bail, I wonder...

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

1/3 Well well well, another year rolls by, and major EDR giants are ditching MITRE's ATT&CK Evaluations for Enterprise 2025. Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, and Microsoft are all sitting this one out, citing "innovation priorities" and resource shifts.

[Rob Smith @vRobSmith]

2/3 With these heavy hitters gone, the participant pool is shrinking further from previous rounds, like the drop from 29 vendors in 2023 to just 19 in 2024. This trend boils my blood, as it creates even more opacity in benchmarks.