US Cybersecurity Going in Reverse, the AWS Outage, and is CISA Okay

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.