Hello, welcome to the Friday, August 20th, 2021 edition of the Sandsenet Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and I'm recording from Stockholm, Germany.

Wrote a little diary today about, well, a lightning strike that hit my house or close to it a couple weeks ago and took out a bunch of network

equipment. So wanted to talk a little bit about what sort of worked, didn't work as far as

protecting my equipment from lightning. Short summary here, one of the things to consider is

that a lot of the search protecters that you commonly buy,

they protect pretty well against an over-waltage that's coming through the power lines.

What quite often happens with close lightning strikes is that the electric field that's coming with the lightning

does induce currents in wires like network cables.

The longer, of course, the more sensitive you may be here, and then causing overcurrents,

over voltages to actually hit network equipment through the network part, which of course is typically not

protected by any kind of search protector. One thing that helped here, of course, was fiber.

Fiber certainly prevents lightning strikes from taking effect this way and also from trawling

from one device to the next.

And it looks like power over Ethernet devices were more vulnerable,

or switches were more vulnerable than non-power over Ethernet switches with the effect that in one case a switch lost its power over Ethernet capability,

but was still able to switch packets just without power over Ethernet capability, but was still able to switch packets just

without power over Ethernet.

And Cisco released a bulletin informing of a critical vulnerability in several of its RV

series routers.

These are typically more small, medium-sized business routers, but the problem here is that while this is a critical vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8, no patch will be released for this vulnerability, at least for some of the affected routers, because, well, they're end of life,

so they are no longer supported. However, if you have one of these routers sitting around,

there's still something that you can do to protect yourself, and that's disabling universal

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