Network Break

byPacket Pushers

NewsTechnology

Network Break keeps you informed with fast, focused analysis of IT news, products, tech trends, and business outcomes. Blending sharp commentary with a touch of humor, hosts Greg Ferro and Drew Conry-Murray sift through the weekly landslide of press announcements, product launches, financial reports, and marketing decks to find the stories worth talking about. You come away with the information and context to make smart decisions in your organization and career … all in the span of a (longish) coffee break.

Episodes(40 episodes)

New Cisco Router Targets AI DCI; Salesforce Launches ServiceNow Competitor

Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on security browsers, and then dive into a deep pool of Juniper vulnerabilities to pick two critical ones affecting Juniper Space. We also get an update from SonicWall that the breach of its cloud storage service affected all users of the service. Cisco announces a new... Read more »

Published: Oct 14, 2025Duration: 30m 55s

Meta Mulls GPU Startup Purchase; Indirect Prompt Injection Exacerbates AI Risks

Take a Network Break! We start with a two-part listener follow-up and sound alarms about a serious flaw in Termix and tens of thousands of still-vulnerable Cisco security devices. Alkira debuts an MCP server and AI copilot for its multi-cloud networking platform; Cato Networks releases a Chrome-based browser extension to help secure contractor and personal... Read more »

Published: Oct 6, 2025Duration: 50m 42s

CISA Orders Immediate Patch of Cisco Vulnerabilities; Firewall Upgrade Blocks Emergency Calls

There’s an abundance of vulnerabilities in this week’s Network Break. We start with a red alert on a cluster of Cisco vulnerabilities in its firewall and threat defense products. On the news front, the vulnerability spotlight stays on Cisco as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issues an emergency directive to all federal... Read more »

Published: Sep 29, 2025Duration: 22m 30s

NVIDIA Buys $5 Billion of Intel Stock; Netskope Rides SASE IPO to an $8.8 Billion Valuation

It’s big-money deals and ever-more AI on this week’s Network Break. We start with a red alert from NVIDIA, which has rolled out a software upgrade to patch multiple bugs in its Triton Inference Server, one of which is a dangerous remote code execution vulnerability. On the news front, NVIDIA pledges a $5 billion investment... Read more »

Published: Sep 22, 2025Duration: 26m 32s

Splunk, ServiceNow Announce AI Agents; Data Center Spending Runs Amok

Take a Network Break! We start with a listener correction on Cisco’s history of wireless certifications, then dig into a couple of red alerts on Microsoft Defender and a backdoor in Outlook. On the news front, Cisco announces new AI agents and SoC packages for Splunk; F5 spends $180 million to buy an AI security... Read more »

Published: Sep 15, 2025Duration: 29m 41s

Hollow Core Fiber Outshines Glass; Broadcom Bags Big AI Bucks

Take a Network Break! We shine a red light on an AnyShare Service Agent API vulnerability and an active exploit against FreePBX. SASE vendor Cato Networks makes first-ever acquisition with purchase of AI security startup AIM, Microsoft researchers tout hollow core fiber tests that out-perform glass core fiber optics, and Wi-Fi 7 helps drive up... Read more »

Published: Sep 8, 2025Duration: 24m 57s

Cisco Gets Serious About Wi-Fi Certs; Is AI Infrastructure Ebullience Ebbing?

Take a Network Break! We start with follow-ups regarding the 7-year-old Cisco bug, risks of AI agents, and Anthropic forcing you to opt out or have your chats saved for five years. Then we highlight a serious vulnerability (which is being exploited in the wild) in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Netscaler Gateway systems. On the... Read more »

Published: Sep 2, 2025Duration: 29m 30s

PQE In PAN-OS; FBI Warns 7-Year Old Cisco Bug Under Attack

Take a Network Break! We double-dip on red alerts as the FBI warns that Russian state hackers are targeting a seven-year-old vulnerability on Cisco IOS and IOS-XE devices (a patch has been available for seven years), and a compromised XZ Utils backdoor is still lurking in some Docker images. Palo Alto Networks has added support... Read more »

Published: Aug 25, 2025Duration: 47m 16s

Boom Times for Arista; SonicWall Offers $200K Firewall Warranty

Take a Network Break! We start with critical vulnerabilities in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and Fortinet’s FortiSIEM. On the news front, SonicWall announces Gen8 firewalls plus a $200,000 warranty for customers that sign on to SonicWall’s Managed Protection Security Suite. IBM Cloud suffers its fourth major outage since May of this year, SASE vendor... Read more »

Published: Aug 18, 2025Duration: 31m 3s

AI Copilot To Help Steer HPE SASE; SoftBank Will Test 5G Airships

Take a Network Break! We start with follow-up on post-quantum support in firewalls and DPDK, then highlight a command injection vulnerability in Ruckus SmartZone software. In tech news, Broadcom rolls out the Jericho4 ASIC to help scale AI across multiple data centers, InfoBlox beefs up DNS protection to spot malicious domains faster, and HPE announces... Read more »

Published: Aug 11, 2025Duration: 57m 56s

Palo Alto Networks IDs New Market With $25 Billion CyberArk Buy; Intel to Shed Networking Biz

Take a Network Break! Guest opinionator Tom Hollingsworth joins Johna Johnson to opine on the latest tech news. On the vulnerability front, several versions of BentoML are open to a server side request forgery. Looking at tech news, Intel will spin out its networking and edge group as it continues cost-cutting, Palo Alto Networks makes... Read more »

Published: Aug 4, 2025Duration: 34m 54s

Fortinet FortiOS Goes Post-Quantum; Intel Scales Back Global Projects

Take a Network Break! In our Red Alert section we note that memory safety bugs bug Firefox and Thunderbird, and on-prem SharePoint instances are under attack. In tech news, Fortinet adds support for Post Quantum Cryptography in FortiOS, Cato Networks integrates Azure Virtual WANs to its SASE offering, and we weigh the pros and cons... Read more »

Published: Jul 28, 2025Duration: 27m 43s

Tomahawk Ultra Chops Congestion; Denmark Invests for Quantum Advantages

Take a Network Break! We begin with a listener question about a paper critiquing Shor’s Algorithm and quantum computing, and touch on a remote code execution vulnerability in Riverbed SteelCentral NetProfiler / NetExpress 10.8.7. We discuss a Cloudflare BGP misconfiguration that caused the Internet to hiccup, Broadcom’s new Tomahawk Ultra ASIC aimed for–you guessed it–AI... Read more »

Published: Jul 21, 2025Duration: 51m 38s

Arista Late to SD-WAN Party but Ready to Dance; CoreWeave Acquires GPUs, Gigawatts for $9 Billion

Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on Arista market share in the enterprise, and then sound the alarm about a remote code execution vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager. On the news front, Arista buys VeloCloud to charge into the SD-WAN market, CoreWeave acquires a cryptominer to get access to GPUs and electricity... Read more »

Published: Jul 14, 2025Duration: 50m 31s

HPE Settles With DoJ to Buy Juniper; Juniper Must Auction Mist Source Code

Take a Network Break! HPE and Juniper have settled with the US Department of Justice, allowing HPE’s $14 billion purchase to move forward. However, as part of the deal, Juniper must grant a full license to its AI Ops for Mist source code to one, or perhaps two, companies via an auction to be overseen... Read more »

Published: Jun 30, 2025Duration: 47m 5s

HPE Deploys AI Agents Into GreenLake; Wi-Fi 7 Drives Q1 Switch Sales

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert is a remote code execution vulnerability in Roundcube. On the news front, HPE announces GreenLake Intelligence, which will bring agentic AI capabilities to the HPE portfolio, Pure Storage brings cloud-like operations for on-prem storage, and Juniper Networks adds predictive analytics to its data center ops platform. Weka rolls... Read more »

Published: Jun 24, 2025Duration: 52m 7s

Cisco Spotlights AI, Unified Management at CLUS; Ultra Ethernet 1.0 Unveiled

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert for the week is a remote code execution vulnerability in open-source XDR platform Wazuh. In tech news, we dig into several announcements from Cisco Live US including: unified management of Meraki and Catalyst gear, new switches, an AI Assistant for the Meraki dashboard, a Deep Network Model LLM,... Read more »

Published: Jun 16, 2025Duration: 21m 42s

Broadcom Hits 102.4 Tbps With Tomahawk 6; Wireshark Debuts Certificate Program

Take a Network Break! We start with two critical vulnerabilities: one affecting cloud versions of Cisco ISE, and the other for HPE StoreOnce. In the news, Broadcom announces the Tomahawk 6 ASIC with 102.4Tbits of bandwidth, SentinelOne suffers a self-imposed network outage, and the Wireshark Foundation announces its first-ever professional certification for Wireshark. Cisco rebrands... Read more »

Published: Jun 9, 2025Duration: 23m 22s

HPE Debuts 8Tbps Switch with Onboard DPUs; NVIDIA Revenues Run Wild

Take a Network Break! We start with a Red Alert for the IBM Tivoli Monitoring Tool, which has an unpatched (as of recording time) vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code. On the news front, Salesforce ponies up $8 billion for Informatica to improve data governance capabilities, Google researchers revise estimates of... Read more »

Published: Jun 2, 2025Duration: 43m 17s

IP Fabric Adds Firewall Rule Simulation; Extreme Networks Debuts Agentic AI in Platform ONE

Take a Network Break! We begin with a Red Alert for critical vulnerabilities Kubernetes Gardener. Up next, a threat actor has been squatting on unused CNAME records to distribute malware and spam, and IP Fabric rolls out a new firewall rule simulation capability to let administrators test the effect of firewall rules on traffic patterns.... Read more »

Published: May 27, 2025Duration: 27m 43s