Ep. 104 - Code Red 25th Anniversary // Marc Maiffret & Dennis Fisher

In this episode, James talks to Co-host Marc Maiffret, and Dennis Fisher of Decipher, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Code Red worm, one of the most consequential moments in cybersecurity history. Marc takes us back to the Friday night he and his friend and co-worker Ryan Permeh were playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater when two customer emails changed everything, leading them to discover a self-propagating worm spreading at 2,000 servers per minute and ultimately landing Marc on a call with the White House situation room and in front of Congress.

Together the three of them dig into what Code Red revealed about the state of security in 2001, from the near total absence of patch management to vendors handling vulnerability disclosures through their marketing departments, and why Marc told Congress at the time that the worm was one of the best things that could have happened to the industry. The conversation draws a striking parallel to today, as AI is compressing the vulnerability exploitation window in ways that mirror the chaos of the early internet era, and Marc warns that the industry is drifting back toward insecure by default, the exact mistake that made Code Red possible in the first place.