Hello, and welcome back to War Economy and State. This is the foreign policy podcast of the Mises Institute. I'm Ryan McMake, an executive editor with the Mises Institute. And with me, as always, is my co-host Zachary Yoast, one of our favorite foreign policy experts here at the Mises Institute. We're going to talk a bit this time about the state of NATO, the war in Ukraine, and a lot of related issues in terms of just how much is the U.S. obligated to enter World War Three if NATO requests it. And what are the impacts of that upon U.S. constitutional institutions? So let's just start off, I think, Zach, with some of the news items that really got a lot of play, at least in the people I follow. As usual, the mainstream media didn't really mention a whole lot. But if you pay any attention to foreign policy people, it was fairly important that they had this NATO meeting in Vilnius Lithuania recently. And it was the usual antics from Zelensky. Now, I would expect Zelensky to behave this way, right? It's a small, powerless country. So he just has to kind of like kick and yell and try and get attention for his country because his country spent the 30 years after freedom from the Soviet Union, basically just being corrupt and not doing any work and being poor. Because that's what they chose. And so they ended up being rather powerless. They also gave up their nukes. So even though they were located right next to Russia, they thought, hey, we don't need any. We don't need the most important defensive weapons imaginable. We'll just give those up. So now they're in bad shape. They trusted the West to protect them. They decided they didn't need to work on alliances with Russia in any way, but would instead go all in with NATO and just completely embrace the West and antagonize the Russians. And now the predictable result has come about. So they're in a position where they just basically need to beg and do everything they can to get to squeeze whatever they can out of NATO countries and their taxpayers. Now, I don't know if you actually agree with my little rant there, but that's my assessment of the situation. And so bring us up to date a little bit about what would you say? I mean, I guess I should summarize first, right? Zelensky goes to NATO. He he wants just unconditional support from NATO. He wants them to set out a timeline. And it just seemed that NATO is a lot more cautious about it than Zelensky wants them to be. And that also perhaps the NATO countries are realizing this war is proving to actually be somewhat expensive and it's not an easy quick victory. And so they're holding back and Zelensky doesn't like that at all. And so you're seeing missiles come out of Ukraine to accusing Americans who oppose the war in Ukraine of, quote, being traitors, whatever that means, not supporting a foreign country makes you a traitor.  So there's all sorts of weird dynamics in that. And I think that the the rhetoric out of Ukraine is becoming more and more shrill as it's becoming clear that they're not exactly on the verge of victory in Ukraine. It doesn't mean the Russians are on the verge of victory either, but this seems to be an issue. And so give us a few of the details then about what what the mood is at Vilnius, kind of what came out of it and what seems to be the relationship now between Ukraine and the people who are actually running NATO. Right. So, yeah, it's quite understandable. Why is Linsky and other Ukrainians are sort of doing what they're doing?  But it is understandable. And a historical parallel I look to is Charles de Gaulle. During World War II, he was always fighting with the British and Churchill has this funny quote that after de Gaulle stormed out of some meeting in a huff, Churchill was like, well, look at him.  And then he's like, perhaps the last of a warrior race. I would not add that to Zelinsky, but I think it is, you know, from an incentive point of view, the Ukrainians are completely dependent on the West. The war would have would be over if we stopped supplying them aid. So it's understandable why they're upset. And so it became clear before the meeting officially started that, you know, obviously Ukraine would not be invited to NATO and they would not, you know, they weren't really going to get much. So Zelinsky sent off this sort of angry, annoyed tweet, just sort of like, you know, being mad about that, which again is understandable. And it actually infuriated a lot of people on the NATO side. There are articles from like anonymous sources saying that like Americans wanted to reduce the language that did come out even more because they were just so pissed off basically that Zelinsky was doing all this. In the end, the communique that was put forth was sort of a great example of bureaucratic nothing speak. It said, we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met, which means nothing. And the Ukrainians realize it means nothing. They did, NATO did say that Ukraine won't have to go through like this partnership program that lots of the other Eastern European countries had to go through, you know, whenever they're actually invited to join, which I suspect will be never. And there was sort of a symbolic picture that made its way around, which was like all of the NATO people, you know, leaders schmoozing it up on sort of like this outdoor stage area. And then Zelinsky was like standing there by himself and no one was looking at him. And so that was sort of interpreted by some as sort of a symbolism of what Ukraine is right now. I mean, people can't look Ukraine in the eyes because we're using Ukraine as sort of a meat shield. And I mean, Lindsey Graham was explicit about this. He basically told it to Zelinsky's face when he was in Ukraine. He was like, oh, it's such a great deal for America that the Ukrainians are killing Russians. Which the other half of that is that Ukrainians are dying instead of Americans. So it's sort of like, thanks, cannon fodder. So I mean, I think this whole war, I mean, from the beginning, I've said, I don't think it's an America's national interest. And it gets even worse in that it's not, you know, in my view, nothing is being accomplished here. I mean, if Russia was some super dangerous threat, then I might be amenable to, you know, using other people rather than Americans. But I don't think that's even close to being the case. And in a way, for those of us who want to avoid World War Three, I think that the summit was a bit of a cause for optimism in that it sort of indicated that the West is not prepared to, like, double down and make the choices that would be necessary to prop Ukraine up for ultimate victory. And we can talk about the state of the supposed counteroffensive. And we can also talk about the extreme disparity in the current capacity the West has versus Russia for waging, basically, a World War One style of attrition, World War One style war of attrition, which is what the war has turned into. So, well, let's talk about the counteroffensive, quote unquote, which is really just, you know, just more death and destruction all around, not doesn't move the conflicts toward an end at all.  I mean, just the cynicism that we get from American policymakers, and I'm sure from Russian policymakers too, but that's not my country. So I don't have to pay as much attention to those people.  And I mean, one example of this is the supposed counteroffensive. We were told it's going to be fabulously successful. The Americans were going to send them some weapons, and they were just going to beat back the Russians. But if you've been paying any attention to the locations of the front lines in these wars or in these, in these areas of Eastern Ukraine, there's very little going on. This is this is the French front. This is the Western front, World War One type of stuff where it's just endless churn, artillery, and very little movement on either side. And we talked about this a little bit in our episode from May, when we looked at the the Pentagon leaks that came out back then and how they were already expressing back then a complete lack of confidence that the counteroffensive would go anywhere. And all it's really accomplished is using up lots of American and European weapons without really moving the lines at all, propelling the war to an end. And it's just it's just ongoing. And I think the more this happens and the more you announce some great, glorious counteroffensive well ahead of time, which of course they do is an attempt to drum up support. It's just going to demoralize I think NATO leaders even more so. And at some point it's just going to be okay, what's what's the point here. And it's clear it's already been established that Russia is not going to have an easy time getting past the river there. So it's it's not a matter of the very existence of Ukraine at this point. It's really just a matter of how much of these Russian areas, these areas with a high degree of ethnic Russian population are going to end up back in Russia. I mean, it wasn't, it was only two months ago that we were being told that Ukraine was going to take back Crimea any day now.  Yeah, they might manage to screw up that bridge a few more times between the mainland and Crimea. But okay, that's that's not how wars are won. So the whole thing is just very, I think, demoralizing for NATO and really just illustrating the fact that this is not going to be what they imagined it to be, which was just some easy victory put Russia in its place. That's just not what we're looking at for the next 10 years. So I did notice that the US was trotting out. I think it was General Milley saying, Oh, yeah, there's been many successes have been obtained through the counter offensive and things are all just going perfectly according to plan. And that's apparently the administration's line. But it I mean, we had an episode six months ago titled Ukraine is not winning and neither is Russia. And that just seems to be there doesn't seem to be much that's changed since then. Yes. So back when we talked about the Pentagon leaks, we discussed how the leaks went into detail about the state of the nine Ukrainian brigades that the that NATO was training for the purposes of this counter offensive. And we at the time remarked how they're going to get like two months of training. And lots of these brigades don't even have all the equipment from the West yet. They're very under equipped, etc, etc. And at the time, I said that, you know, we're sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel here to equip these units. And we don't need the US policymakers don't even, you know, they admitted they don't think it's going to succeed. So then what comes next? What's the point of all this? And it seems that that's playing out now. The offensive has been going on for weeks. And really nothing has been accomplished. I mean, you know, random villages that are sort of in the gray zone keep switching sides, but nothing of strategic consequences happened. And lots of this equipment, which we can't really replace has been trashed. Ukraine admitted like in the first week of the offensive, they lost like 20% of the equipment we gave them. You can find tons of videos online of leopard tanks, which weird people online were obsessing about. There's sort of these cycles of obsessing about random technology. This random technology will prove the breakthrough, you know, and save Ukraine and win the war. It's never happened yet.  And so many Bradley's too. And so nothing's really been accomplished. There is rumblings. I mean, there's so many things reported that it's sort of hard to like until it happens. I'm, you know, suspicious, but Ukraine itself has reported that there's basically a buildup of 100,000 Russian troops sort of on the what might be called Northern Front to sort of what could be a counter offensive against sort of the Kharkiv region, which Russia had sort of moved in when the war started. Then they just sort of abandoned it, slash were pushed out because they had barely any troops there.  So we'll see if that happens. And I think that's a good sort of next thing to discuss is this style of warfare, because it like sort of the war on terror was quite a high tech war. Lots of air power, you know, our enemies were, you know, the height of their technical sophistication was driving around on a Toyota, shoot, I'm forgetting the name, there's a Toyota truck that all of the rebel groups in the world use with a machine gun mounted on the back. That's not, of course, an F-16 could blow that up. We could have F-16s and TAC helicopters and whatnot flying all over the place without really worrying they'd be shot down, things like that. Well, and it seems the Russians also made this mistake some as well about thinking what the future of war is going to look like, that it's going to be this high tech stuff. And we can see this in our extremely capital intensive war industries production process. I mean, we're building about 150 F-35s every year. I mean, that's not a lot of fighters. And if there were to be like a war reminiscent of World War II or something where like dozens of aircraft are lost every day, obviously that would not be sustainable. So Russia seems to be moving into this sort of industrial wartime footing. In John Meersheimer's words, Russia's domestic armaments industries designed to fight World War I. And it looks like this is sort of a World War I style conflict. So that's of great benefit to them. And there's a really great report that I recommend everyone read. We'll put it in the show notes. It's from the Royal United Service Institute, which is a British think tank. It's called Meat Grinder. Russian tactics in the second year of its invasion of Ukraine. And it's chock full of interesting information, including that the Russians apparently hold probably the world record for the longest ground to air shoot down of an aircraft, things like that. But what is shocking is that Russia's domestic armaments industry can produce 2.5 million artillery rounds a year. This is 152 millimeters. And as we discussed when that CSIS report came out in January, currently the US can produce like 93,000 rounds of 155 millimeter artillery rounds. And when we reach accelerated production, we'll be able to produce 240,000 rounds a year. So we can produce a tenth of what Russia can produce. This doesn't count Russian imports from Iran and North Korea. And on top of this, sort of going back to the NATO summit of why the West is not really interested in doubling down here, despite all of the moral posturing, a report came out. It was like broken by a German media outlet. And then it's been reported in English. But supposedly Germany had 20,000 rounds of artillery left in its arsenal. That's it. That's less than one day of what Russia fires in the current war. I mean, I can't even believe it. It's sort of crazy to think that. And there's talk of increasing American artillery production to like 90,000 rounds a month, which is a huge increase from where we're at now, but not anywhere capable of matching the Russian rate of fire. That Russi report I mentioned estimates that Russia fired 12 million rounds of artillery last year. Well, in the first year of the war. No, no, just calendar year 2022. And this year they expect to fire 7 million rounds. So a big decrease, because they're burning through all of the old Soviet stocks from the 70s. But still, it's a massive, massive disproportion. I mean, most of the casualties in World War One were from artillery. And there have been some Americans who have been complaining, like American military leaders, like we trained these Ukrainians in the Western tactics way of fighting, you know, they need to be aggressive and storm the Russian lines and get up in there. And instead, they're falling back into the old Soviet tactics, which it's worth pointing out, like all of the Ukrainian military leadership were in the Soviet military, all these old guys, of just bombing the heck out of the other side with artillery. And one of the Ukrainian military advisors was like, well, why don't they come here and they can do it themselves was his response. So it's my view, and we can go into this more at length, John Mirsheimer sort of lays it out quite well from a sort of war of attrition standpoint. It is my view that in the long run, assuming, you know, futures radically uncertain, this is more of a sort of expectation than an ironclad prediction. But Ukraine is going to be ground down by superior Russian logistics and population, and specifically the huge imbalance of artillery. And we'll probably, over the next seven, I mean, it's going to take a long time, tens of thousands more people will probably be killed. But Russia will probably grind away and capture, you know, what's called Nova Rusya, basically Odessa, Kharkiv, sort of get to the Dnipro River. That's my expectation. Of course, things could change. But and the end result is Ukraine will exist as a completely dysfunctional rump state that could never join NATO or the EU. And John Mirsheimer predicted all this in 2014. So it's very depressing about how just pointless this whole conflict is. Yeah, I mean, when you're in that part of the world, a lot of the time, the people who favor the war, they think that we're like naive about Russia. And that we think Russia is just a friendly, wonderful country. And we just don't realize the implacable enemy here. Actually, we're the ones who are saying, gee, the Ukrainians should find a way to live in peace with this gigantic country right next to them. And it was the Americans who were goading them into all sorts of anti Russian movements within their own government, and just trying to blatantly favor the West over any reproachment with Russia. And that's what caused a lot of the problems. It's not about pandering Russia. It's just about realizing the realities of being next to a local regional hegemon. But you mentioned that you're allegedly pro Putin or something just by recognizing the realities that that are at play here. I mean, if you're next to China, should you spend all your time antagonizing China? I mean, not even Japan does that. And Japan has all sorts of defense guarantees.  So that's that's just been a faulty reality all along that Ukraine has thought it could create. And it didn't work out. And the US didn't anticipate I think the realities of this war at all as you note the phrase that the US was, I think, doubling down on was over the horizon warfare. And that was that was this whole thing about how well we don't need any troops really in theater. Well, we can just send Tomahawk missiles over the horizon. We can send bombers. And we can just I mean, they would just outright say like, Biden says we can we've developed over the horizon capability that we can keep our eyes on and defend ourselves from any direct threats to the United States, which of course is true, right? If you're actually talking about defensive warfare, if you're talking about defending North America, which Biden is not, then yeah, that's all you need over the horizon is plenty. You've got a Navy there. You've got high tech weapons that could disable any attempt at any sort of invasion of North America. But of course, when they say direct threats to the US, they mean any myriad of things that go on an endless list of vaguely defined US interests in other regions. But it's clear from this that that's not sufficient. If you're actually going to try and do a US power projection into Central Asia, it seems that you're going to hit a wall when you finally start to encounter actual warfare, and that you're either going to need to use foreigners to die for you in large numbers, or you're going to need to actually mobilize your own country that is the United States and start producing huge amounts of armaments, which apparently they're not willing to do at this point.  And it seems the Americans just aren't willing to do that.  And there was a lot of doubt even then at its ability to really accomplish all these lofty goals that the White House and the Pentagon had for basically global war everywhere for the United States to intervene on every continent whenever it felt like. And over the horizon sounds great politically, but apparently isn't all that actually effective in terms of dealing with anything, but some dirt poor third world country like Iraq. So seems to be a failed vision for the US military right there and counter offensive not doing well. And so we're kind of up in the air here. It seems that now we're now facing talk about, well, gee, let's, let's just escalate and see what happens. And we've seen a couple of ways that that's been happening. One has been, well, let's just, let's talk about using F-16s more in Eastern Europe and see, see what that means. Now, these are airplanes that could carry nuclear arms. And so that could be perceived as a nuclear threat. Hopefully that will restrain the US somewhat in the use of these, these weapons. And now there's the use of cluster bombs that the US has suddenly decided is okay. Even though we were told 18 months ago that the use of cluster bombs is a war crime because the Russians were doing it, but now apparently using cluster bombs is fine, as long as the Ukrainians are the ones using it, which actually it would be fine to just say that. I mean, not fine in the sense of I would be fine with it, but you could at least see how it would be pretty standard military talk to say, well, they shouldn't use cluster bombs and they forced us to use cluster bombs. But all the self righteousness about how anyone uses cluster bombs is, is a war criminal. And then just forget all that, all that stuff we said about cluster bombs, that doesn't count. And by the way, the US would never use cluster bombs against civilians, which of course is a proven lie. So you could just see how the goalposts are being constantly moved as victory remains far off and how the US continues to embrace these moves that are really escalations in the war from the US side. And so then we're left with G say that this does lead to war and some sort of incursion into a NATO country, is the US then just automatically required to go to war for NATO. And we touched on this briefly before long ago last year sometime, where it's debatable that this treaty with NATO just means the US it's a push button war, right? Oh, NATO country invaded US is at war now. Rand Paul tried to bring this up by noting, hey, you know, the constitution says that the Senate has to be involved in foreign policy decisions. And maybe there needs to be a congressional vote and some sort of declaration of war before the US enters into World War Three. And he tried to basically pass some legislation along those lines in the Senate and it failed. And that that's fairly alarming that so many senators want to commit the US to war without any sort of debate or any sort of actual approval from the elected representative bodies of Congress that are supposed to have the last word in foreign policy. So it seems that this is just another excuse for the regime to tie down the US into another war which could be triggered at any time and they don't want to trouble themselves with any sort of debate or constitutional matters whatsoever. Right. Yeah. And the Rand Paul's point is completely well established within the historical record. You can go back because the first sort of alliance where this was discussed was not NATO. NATO came afterwards. It was the Rio treaty, which is the only alliance I approve of, a standing alliance, which is basically it was the US and most of the Western Hemisphere. Mexico left in 2002, which I consider unfortunate. But it also contains sort of an attack on one as an attack against all provision. And the US Congress at the time had all these hearings clearly establishing that when they signed off on this, it did not mean that someone invoked that their attack were automatically a war. It does not supersede Congress. That's all perfectly well established. Now, I wanted to touch on a few points you brought up regarding the cluster bombs. The whole reason we're sending these cluster munitions is because we cannot, we're out of regular artillery shells to send. We're sort of at the stage of the war. We said in two episodes ago or whatever it was that we're scraping the bottom of the barrel to outfit this counteroffensive. And Biden himself admitted when he was interviewed like, why are we sending these cluster bombs? Well, we don't have enough artillery ammunition to send them. So it's sort of we're just finding whatever we can in the back of the cupboard. And I, because I don't think we should be sending any military aid to Ukraine, of course, don't support sending cluster munitions. But I will point out that in my estimation, these cluster munitions are not going to really be adding too much to the balance of postwar suffering that Ukraine, or what will probably be former areas of Ukraine when the war is over, is going to experience. Both Ukraine and Russia and the US are not signatories to the Ottawa Convention, I think it's called, which bans anti-personnel landmines. Now, both Ukraine and Russia had huge stockpiles of what are called PFM-1 anti-personnel mines. They're also called butterfly mines. They're really small and they're plastic, and they're basically deployed via airburst artillery rounds or they're dropped from aircraft. And they're called butterfly rounds because they're they're sort of like maple seeds that sort of twirl around. They're small, they're plastic, I mean they're, so many kids are going to be killed by these mines. And it's well established that both Russia and Ukraine are using these mines. The whole front is littered with mines. There's been a huge impediment to the counter-offensive as vehicles are just running over mines left and right. And so that is just something to be aware of is that the whole place is already mined a heck. And these cluster munitions certainly going to kill lots of civilians in the postwar, but probably not nearly as much as the mines Ukraine and Russia are already using. And on the point of the sort of over horizon capability, I was stunned when I learned this, but NATO requires, well it has this, you know, really aspirational goal that all of its members stockpile enough arms and munitions for one month of high intensity warfare. And this I discovered in the context of Germany is 20,000 rounds of artillery left, which isn't enough for one day of warfare in Ukraine. So it's, and it's like Germany is hoping to meet this goal by like 2032 or something. So no one, I mean it's sort of, you know, in Austrian economics we talk about demonstrated preference. The demonstrated preference of the West as a whole, including the United States is not adopting the sort of industrial footing necessary to wage a war that would, what a war with Russia would require. So on the one hand I think that's good. On the other hand, if such a war were to break out, it would be quite a disaster for, I mean, everyone. Not that Russia would be blitzkrieging across Europe, but it'd just be a series of disasters for the U.S. And as you said, changing the U.S. economy, I mean I have no doubt in the long run the U.S. would likely triumph just because we're so wealthy. We have such a huge industrial capacity, but it's not like you can go from producing, you know, random junk that they sell at the dollar store to producing artillery shells in a month.  So yeah, it's, that aspect is also worrisome. But it's sort of just why I don't think Ukraine will be able to sustain the war indefinitely. I mean, eventually it's going to be slow, grinding, lots of people will be killed, but Russia has the capacity to fight this war, and Ukraine does not. Well, and I think it's just really time to admit that a lot of those myths that we had from the early days of the war are just wrong, right? I mean we could go down the whole list. If the U.S. will just arm Ukraine, it'll all be over in no time at all. It was in early contention, right? The Russians will cut and run. It was the same sort of myths that the like used to tell the losing sides in centuries past. Like the Confederates who would never had a chance of winning that war, at least not with the methods they employed. If they'd used guerrilla warfare, they might have had a chance, but they insisted on these pitched battles and open warfare. So there was no way you were going to win that against the better equipped north. But what they told themselves... They had a pro-industrial base, and they found early industrial war. Exactly. Yeah, one of perhaps one of the first proto-industrial wars, and they just didn't have the base for it. So they told themselves that one Confederate volunteer was as good as five Yankee higher-ups. Right? Well, that's just not true. Are you as good as 10 industrially produced Northern cannon? Probably not. So that just seems to be an issue here, is that the will to win... I recently saw that from Zelensky. Our will to win is so great that we will triumph. Well, will to win doesn't really mean anything. Positive thinking doesn't get you far. Right. This is one of the three factors that Mirsheimer lays out in a war of attrition. There's the balance of artillery, the balance of resolve, and the balance of population. And I highly recommend everyone read Mirsheimer's first book, Conventional Deterrence. Because unlike so many highfalutin thinkers, Mirsheimer has studied and is familiar with sort of the more mundane aspects of fighting a war, not just, oh, the U.S. is great, so we can win. So let's look at balance of population. I've... let's see, I have it here. It's a big difference, as soon as that... Yeah. Mirsheimer estimates that before the war started, there were 3.5 Russians for every Ukrainian. And in that figure, he counts all the people in Donbas who are fighting a civil war against Ukraine. So he says at this point now that 9 million Ukrainians or so have left Ukraine, he estimates there are 5 Russians for every Ukrainian. And also, about 3 million of those Ukrainians who left Ukraine went to Russia for speaking to the sort of fraternal nature of the war. Then let's look at the balance of artillery, which is not surprising at all. We've already talked about, you know, the Russians can produce 2.5 million shouts a year in addition to the, you know, vast Soviet stockpiles, whereas the West is basically the covered spare. So the range is basically Russia outguns Ukraine 5 to 10 to 1. 5 or 10 to 1 in that range, which is just enormous. So whenever you hear, like, oh, the Russians are losing so many more men than Ukraine, just not pass the common sense test at all.  It's like, there's this is the most recorded war in human history thus far. Do we have any videos of, you know, hundreds of Russians running across the mine littered field? No, we don't. And then we get to the balance of resolve, which is sort of equally matched.  But if you think, you know, sort of through a realist framework, Russia had reasons to initiate this war. If it considers the situation an existential threat. So Russia is willing to face huge casualties. And Ukraine, obviously, the war is an existential threat.  But let's look at the history of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union faced an existential threat in World War II, they sustained 27 million deaths and kept on humming along. I mean, we cannot, Matt, like, I cannot wrap my mind around that. 27 million people killed.  The Taiping rebellion? Yes, the Taiping rebellion, where some estimates of like 90 million people were killed.  And so if you think Russia is in this for, you know, fun, then, of course, it's like, of course, the Ukrainians have much more will. But if you think Russia is fighting this war, because people in the West openly talk about initiating regime change in Russia, trying Putin for war crimes, and there's talk of breaking Russia up.  And the former head of foreign policy at Heritage, who's now at Hudson, has like a short paper on like, well, yeah, we can break Russia up. I mean, this is obviously an existential war for the Russian state's continued existence. So there, it's like... In their minds, it's obviously a war for... Right, yeah. I mean, the perception is clearly there, right? You could agree with it or not agree with it. Right, yeah. It doesn't matter if you think that Russia's actually existentially threatens, it matters that they think they are. Right. And so it, I think it's sort of our cheapskate American thoughts on war, you know, as we're talking about over the horizon. War, we recognize is super expensive. So we can't imagine people be willing to double down for sort of a World War I style war of attrition, but obviously they are. So we have to face that reality. And the sooner we sort of cut a deal, the better things will be for everyone, but especially for Ukraine, which is probably, you know, at this point, whatever's left of Ukraine is going to be very poor, very dysfunctional, and, you know, not getting into NATO or the EU anytime soon. Yeah, the whole view of war among Americans is just so completely different from what Russians are. I mean, not even we with all of our jingoism have named World War II the Great Patriotic War. I mean, that's the view of World War II. I mean, you think we have our good war. I mean, boy, this is a war where they sustained, as you said, dozens of millions of deaths and just kept going. And it's all just seen as necessary and good in that they defeated the Nazis. So the idea that Americans would sustain that sort of thing, those sorts of percentages is really, I mean, in my mind, said if I was in Russia or this country just decided, hey, we're going to send you into the meat grinder to defend the glory of America in some borderland that is a thousand miles from your home. I'd be like, bye. I mean, I'm out of there. But that's not everybody thinks that way in the world. And so, yeah, Russians have a certain view, a certain resolve. And you have to look at their view of that corner of the world. It's like when the U.S. tried to defeat the British during the Napoleonic Wars with an embargo. And they're like, oh, this will make the British do what we want because we'll embargo all of their stuff. And the British are like, hey, we're facing an existential threat from Napoleon. We couldn't care less about your embargo. That's not going to change our thoughts on anything. And whether they actually did face an existential threat from Napoleon is immaterial. The fact is that they had this huge resolve because they saw it that way. And so American efforts just had no effect whatsoever in trying to bring the British to the negotiating table. So these are just things you have to be aware of. And yeah, the will to victory, I just don't think it's any greater with the Ukrainians than the Russians.  And it's a motivating factor. And you just have to recognize that it's something that's going on. And so I think that, however, is going to keep the war going. At the same time, though, it's clear that the defensive side of the war from the American perspective is a lot better than what the anti-Russian people were telling us, right, that, oh, the Russians are going to be rolling through Poland and Austria, and they're going to be reestablishing the old Soviet Union. It's blatantly obvious that that is just not going to happen and that the Russians don't have anywhere near the capability of doing that sort of thing. And the fact that they're not trying to hold on to any area that doesn't have a sizable ethnic Russian minority or majority right now. So conquering Poland just isn't in the cards. And I don't hear it as much, but you still hear it a little bit, that unless American taxpayers keep arming the Ukrainians, the Russians are just going to keep going. But it's difficult to see how that was ever even possible without U.S. intervention, because they would have needed forces to occupy. They would have needed offensive weapons to keep pushing forward when it just doesn't seem that the Russian military is equipped for that whatsoever. Their over-the-rise capability isn't really much at all. They're really well suited to this sort of boots-on-the-ground situation. So no threat to the U.S. It's just, it's clearly no threat to Europe beyond central Ukraine. And yet it just, we're continue to be told by the administration that this is just going to have to go on for 10 years. And a lot of both Russians and Ukrainians are going to die in the process. Yeah, it is odd that people seem to have sort of like a bifurcated brain. On the one hand, Ukraine's all that's keeping Russia from marching down into Paris. And on the other hand, Russia is so incompetent and their soldiers are fighting with shovels because they don't have guns that, of course, Ukraine will easily roll through, recapture Crimea, and Russia won't use nukes in any of this. So it's sort of a very unserious, Robert Nisbet has a good quote that American foreign policy has always been very moralistic. And I mean, we obviously see that here. And I think part of that is because America's never really been invaded. In the war of 1812, oh, they burned the White House down. We've not actually like been invaded. And I think it has skewed our perspective so much. It's a, you know, a blessing we're so safe. But it's also a curse in that people have very unrealistic expectations of what can be done in the world. I mean, in contrast, Soviet Union, 27 million dead. And I mean, personally, Putin, his older brother died in the stage of Leningrad. He was like a child who starved to death. And I think he lost like five of his six uncles in the war. I mean, can any American compare to that who's not a refugee from some war-torn hellhole? I don't think so. So I think it'd be beneficial if people could, and this is one of realism's strong points, is trying to step into the shoes of the other side. This doesn't mean morally endorsing whatever they're doing. But if you can see things from the other side's perspective, rather than sort of approaching with this sort of moral, righteous, like self-righteousness of, you know, the world is really simple. We're the good guys. They're the bad guys. They must be crushed in histories on our side is sort of, I think, would be beneficial for everyone. Well, when that all work doesn't fails to work out, like in Vietnam, then you just pretend it never happened. And you never said those things. That seems to be, I mean, the fact that the internet is forever has not restrained anybody. It seems from just making wild predictions and claims and knowing that it will be, you can reference it and find it 20 years from now. Nobody seems to care. I guess it's the reality TV effect. Just say outlandish, ultra-confident things endlessly, no matter how wrong you are. And then when you're proven wrong, you just move on to the next outrageous prediction. I guess that's certainly not limited to foreign policy. I think it's the volume effect. There's just so much stuff produced on the internet.  I'm curious how true that is in the really long run, but I wouldn't want to have to be sorting through like comments and takes even things in newspapers from this time period because there's so many. I mean, we didn't even talk about the so-called attempted coup because I mean, it's all news now. I did an interview and I said, in a few weeks, most people have forgotten this happens because the news cycle is so fast that it's, I mean, things that happened in February of this year, that might as well be medieval history. Yeah, remember the coup that was going to happen in Russia? Yeah, you're right. We've completely moved on. There's no mentions of it at all and no recriminations, no analysis of what it meant. What can we learn from it? No time. We've just got to get on to the next thing. So that's where we are. Well, there were hot takes the minute it happened of like what it meant, but I would say events since they have proven most of the in-the-moment analysis wrong and yeah, people don't seem too interested. And I mean, I still don't really know what has exactly transpired there, but. Well, that might be good for a future episode if we could figure out some of the interesting facts and right answers. Well, and next time in the future, we also have to talk about recruitment issues with the military. There's a few things I think we could still talk about here. And so, yeah, let's wrap up this episode of War Economy and Stay. We will be back next month with a new episode. So thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.


At this point, we've clearly identified the account that's having issues. So let's talk a little bit more about cleanup. The first method that I want to talk about is specific to workers. Now we'll see in here, this isn't quite so easy for this account because he's got a couple of different installments. He's got a Drupal one, DocuWiki known, and we can go in there and look at the files and suddenly confirm that those are actually applications. You don't really want to assume, obviously, by folder names because a folder could be named anything and it could still be malicious content inside there. But I can see from the file list there, that's a typical known install up here. This is a typical WordPress install. For the majority of this, I'm going to focus on WordPress but I'm going to show you some cleanup tools that don't care about what kind of application it is. They look more at the actual code and use signatures to figure out, you know, similar like a virus scanner, right? They're going to look at, well, that's not an issue. I don't care what application it is, they've got ejected code in there, so we should quarantine that file. So... Wasn't one of the alerts that Process Manager was showing for known? It was, yeah. Yeah, so an under known, it was in the under known one. So for that, what we'll do is we'll run a scanner on the entire account and that will pull out some of those things. Exactly, yeah. But in some of the things that I'll talk about, like first with the manual thing, I'm going to do manual based on a WordPress install but some of the same things apply with other applications. So with manual, the way that you want to approach this is to break down the content and we're only worried about the file system here. So you've got file system and database. The database rarely is ever going to be hacked. The only thing that I ever look at in a database is are there any strange additional user accounts that shouldn't exist? For the most part with your users, they'll probably have a single administrative user. It's their account. There are some cases where with the WordPress account, if I look at that user table, I'll see like wp.service as a username and that's clearly an injected admin account that they're using to take control and do some things. I see that occasionally, but typically, you know, we're mostly focused on the file system. And so with the file system, what we're trying to break down here is what's the legitimate content that the user added versus the stuff that can safely be replaced with a fresh copy. So that's how we're going to clean this up. So with the WordPress install, you've got a bunch of files in the root directory, wp config, wp comments and those kind of things. And you've essentially got three folders. All of this other stuff, those are other installs right now. So we're not going to focus on that. So focus on the things that I haven't highlighted.  This is an additional one. It's not related to WordPress. We can take a look at that. It's probably at site now. But you've got these. wp admin is going to be all your administrative functions. That's when you're in the dashboard WordPress. wp includes is going to be all your JavaScript files, all your CSS, all your assets and things like that. Those two folders, you can completely delete and replace with fresh copies. So let's do that now. There is no reason, and actually I don't, you know, not only should the plugins and themes not add stuff there, but they don't and they may not be able to, but they definitely shouldn't. These can be replaced every time you update WordPress. So you can safely delete these. You can delete most of these files here. So obviously not going to test this Word document. That's something that the user... What about that XML file? Yeah, let's look at the XML file. I guess it was just like that. It looks like maybe the user was trying to verify them site, but there's, themselves, their site with being closed. So, you know, it doesn't look entirely dangerous. It's an XML file, so it can't execute as code. So I'm not going to be concerned too much with this one. I'm mostly focusing on PHP scripts, things that can be processed on the server in that way. So we'll skip over that. The only other two files on here that you want to hold onto are HD access and WP config. So WP config is my connection to the database, right? That's got all the information about what my database is. That's unique to this install. You don't want to delete that one. HD access is for making nice URLs on WordPress so that people don't have to type slash index dot dot PHP when they go to the website. So we want to hold onto this. We could make sure that everything's clean in here, and this is a good example of a default version of the WordPress HD access file. And if you actually go, I just search WordPress HD access. I go here all the time. The top result is in the WordPress codex, and they give you the exact language of what a default WordPress HD access file should look like. Sorry, I have seen hacked HD access files before in that event since we can't delete them. Do you just replace it with the generic WordPress code there and move on? If you're unsure and you want to check with the user to see if they added stuff or whatever, you can always rename the HD access file, and that stops it from being addressable. And you could then put a clean one in there to make sure that the WordPress site works. But you could will often do like dot HD access dash off or something like that, but Apache stops processing it at that point.  And they do this so that people go into the site normally, you don't know they're hacked. But if you come through Google, they just redirect you right on to porn pages or whatever they're trying to do there. And so that's their way around it is to check and see whether the user agent, the browser that's viewing the website is a search engine. And so they'll redirect traffic based on that. HD access can see that kind of information. And so they take advantage of that. So that's usually what you'll see near the top is, you know, if they're Google or Bing or something like that, I want you to redirect a strange PHP file instead of index.php. I actually have an example of that on the HD access document. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. So that's usually what we see here. Another thing that I noticed while I pulled it up, so we'll just go ahead and address it, is that this WP config file has injected PHP code at the top of it. So normally your WP config file is going to start obviously with the PHP tag, and then it starts with a couple of comments about it and goes right into the database connection stuff. All of this, these included stuff, that's problematic. You know, this is injecting additional content in here and saying, you know, if somebody tries to go to this URL and they get a parameter or something, go ahead and let them read the content inside it and no one should ever be able to read the content inside WP config because that's been obviously interested in database passwords and information. So one thing that I can do here is just clean it up. Just remove that injecting code from the top there and then I can look over the rest of it and see if anything's crazy in there. You can compare this. You can do a default clean install and compare it to see if anything else looks weird and the rest of this is following the standard format of WP config file. Do you ever change, like, reset database passwords or anything? Like, if a site can compromise? It's not a bad idea. You know, it's worth adding to the list is something to do. I think it's unlikely that anybody's manually reading this stuff, right? They're using that injected code to take the database password and immediately start injecting stuff into the database. So once you've removed all the malicious code, it's unlikely that they have access to the database anymore. But, yes, cycling, and we'll talk some more about heartening WordPress and peer defenses after you've done a cleanup. Cycling any passwords is always a good common practice, but the database password, the login to WordPress, the FTP account, it's just good practice to make sure you're starting off on the best foot so that you don't come back a week later and you're back to the races trying to figure out an issue because it's been hacked again. So other than WP config and HD access, so we've got two main WordPress files on the top level, and then we have WP content folder. WP content stores all of the uploads, all the media uploads from the site, all the themes that have been uploaded, all the plug-ins that have been uploaded. And then it's got some various other folders depending on the upgrade folder is a temporary folder that's used by WordPress to upgrade itself. It loads a clean copy of WordPress in there and uses that to upgrade the site automatically. Plug-ins can add it like this in GG is a gallery plugin. So they can add folders to WP content. The things that we want to be concerned about with mostly are going to be plugins and themes. And this is the part that's really a little bit of a pain. The only way really to do this manual process of cleaning it up is to download each of these plugins from WordPress.org and replace it completely with the clean copy. There are scanners, and I'm going to show you how to do scanners, but here's the issue. The scanner's going to go, that's injected code, quarantine that file. And then remember when I loaded that site and that plugin was broken? That's why, because a scanner was run on the past in quarantine files and now the site's broken because it doesn't have a plugin file that it needed. Similar to the WP config file we were looking at, there's injected code at the top, but we needed the rest of the WP config file in order for the database to connect. You do need these files in there, but you need clean copies. And so there's not great ways to clean out injected code unless it follows a specific pattern where it's the same injected code in every file. And so the only failsafe way is to get clean copies of everything and replace them out. If it's a proprietary or four-fee plugin or themes, how does that work? That's the problem again. That's usually, and clearly at this point you're probably not doing this where you're going to be talking to the student about what possibilities are. Okay, are you using all these plugins? Do you have copies of them? You're going to want to go in and replace them with this kind of stuff. So it's by no means the expectation and this is a struggle that we have every client hosting as well as we'll often start the cleanup for some of them and then it's like, if I go in here and they have 25 plugins and this is one of 15 different installs that they were playing around with, then we're going to have a conversation about what do you really need in your hosting account because you've been hacked and we need to figure out what's the need to have stuff versus the largest plug with known for a week and never really did anything. Well, there's no use making that a clean and tight install again versus just removing it, right? So it's worth having conversations with the users. But yeah, when it comes to premium themes and plugins, if they have it, they should have access to download a clean copy. Otherwise, you're going to want to do the scanning method and run a virus scan to see if you can identify those files. The problems that you'll run into can sometimes be if the scanner doesn't find everything and then you've done all this other cleanup work but those still exist and then they're able to then spread that out. The thing to know about Cpanel specifically when it comes to security is that all the files in your account are owned by that Cpanel user because they all share the same permissions. You know, that known install can inject code into that WordPress install. That WordPress install can then spread and create other folders in Drupal and other things. So they're all, all those applications are owned by the same user and all these files have the same permissions for that user. So if a plugin has code that allows it to execute as your Cpanel user, there's no limit within that user's account to be able to do what it wants. So that's where... Everything's at risk at that point. Exactly, and that's where it can be tough with the cleanup because you'll clean something up but if you miss one thing, it can spread right back out again. So, yeah, it's also a good method as you're doing these manual cleanups specifically, but with any cleaned up, once you've done what you can, take a backup of it. You know, take a snapshot of it. You know, you can use install to back up. You can download those files manually. Keep a hard copy. Return to it a week later and see where we are. Did it get hacked again? It definitely is, it definitely is. And that's again where the conversation with the user is, have you made any changes recently? When was the last time you wrote on your site and restoring a backup? So, Reclaim Posting keeps 30 days of off-site backups on all of our servers. Files and database. So, if you put in a support ticket to us and say, I need you to roll back a site to two weeks ago on this date, we'll do it. No questions asked. It's easy enough for us to do. There's also a C-Panel plugin to do it under the files area. So, the feature is called R1soft. So, those are off-site backups not stored on your server and we can roll back to any particular date. You know, using it with the plugins is helpful because if the user doesn't know and they say, well I haven't written stuff in two weeks, you can go back and maybe I just take one example. Let's see, is there a test folder two weeks ago in there? Is the WP config file? Does that have injected code? So, you may have to roll back and see. You don't have to restore those backups yet but you can download an individual file and say, is this a clean copy of it? You know, try to figure out when it was hacked. Based on that. You can also look at time stamps for when stuff changes. So, if you find an injected code site when somebody injected that code the time stamps should have changed. So, we're looking at, I'm totally clear with that. Exactly. So, you might say, and he might say, I haven't written since the summer. So, at that point, you could safely just say give us the oldest backup that you have a copy of if it's in the last 30 days. Give us the 30-day version because that will hopefully be a month better than what we have at the moment to start the cleanup process and maybe even take care of most of it for you. So, the key thing with rolling to a backup versus the manual, if you're doing a manual you're going to get a clean copy of WordPress and clean copy of all the plugins and themes which means you're going to be up to date. If you roll from a backup the reason that it got hacked is because something was out of date. I can almost guarantee you this. The reason WordPress gets hacked has been of WordPress, the plugin, or the theme. Specifically, some of the more popular ones. Jetpack has meant some of these plugins and themes that are very popular. The 20 versions of themes, 2015, 16, those are getting updates all the time and it's because they're fixing security holes but those security holes are public. Hackers look at them and they also know that there are millions of people with that because that's a default plugin where Jetpack is run by millions of people so I can probably start scanning the web for that specific loophole and find sites that I can take advantage of. So, it's really important to keep your stuff up to date.  And then cycle the passwords, right? Right, right, right, yeah. Cycle the passwords too.  So obviously we can't delete the WP content folder because that's all the user's actual content, the plugins, the themes, the uploads. We can replace the plugins and themes. We can look inside the uploads folder for any PHP files. You should never see a PHP file inside the uploads folder. It should always, it should, and that's within WP content. So by going to the uploads folder plugins can add folders. Again, that gallery of plugins adding some stuff. I kind of think that's totally normal and then WordPress separates it by a folder for a year. You should only ever see images in here. The Linux commands that you can run to say show me the PHP file inside this folder and you'll go recursive down into there so you don't have to drill around and do some stuff as well. Graph and copy workers. I'm going to go in here. Now I don't need to do the WP content folder but you'll see here everything else I'm good to go. They don't include a WP config file. They do a sample version of it. So I'm okay there to just upload everything here including the WP admin and the WP foods folder. And so I just skip over that WP content one. We have clean version of WordPress. So I know there's no injecting code within the core WordPress files and meanwhile I'll work on the plugins and themes and then we're going to look at some of the scanning tools that you can use within WordPress as well to clean some stuff out. You can use scanning tools at the server. This is something that can be run on the server. You just run this command and it installs it and then you can specify when you're running it on the server a specific folder to scan. This is a scanner. It's basically a virus scanner. It's got a set of signatures specific exploits that it's looking for injecting code that it's looking for and when it finds those files and then a new specific folder for you. So it's a good thing to run on the entire account. It is free and open source. It is very basic. It's okay. It will not catch everything in my experience so it's a good first pass and stuff. There are options within this thing to do a prawn job so that it runs daily. So it never hurts to have on a server and just daily run through all accounts with it. You can have an email, your report of anything that it finds. So it's not a bad preventative tool as well just to make sure that you're up and running. It could be a good first line of defense to know if an account got hacked if it quarantined this specific file that might give you a heads up before things are really, really everything's injected all of it so that kind of thing you might be able to get an early warning with one or two files that got quarantined by this. Is this run through a web interface or something like that? Yeah, unfortunately this is all terminal with this one. It's a binary that's installed on the server itself and so it's not bad. I will show you a GUI interface for a program that I like a lot better. It's one that we're going to be rolling out. We run it on all of our shared hosting and there was a fee for doing so but more and more we decided we're going to be rolling this out to all servers just because it's really good. It's made by the same folks who make the firewall so we just skidged. So you remember there was that config server firewall so that same company and config server firewall is free that same company offers the config server exploit scanner and that's what we have here and they actually have an interface for doing the scanning. A lot of documentation and a lot of different options on this one. There's no time really to go through all of it but I will show you some of the commands that you can run in here to do a scan on the site and what a particular scan looks like. If I go here to generate commands I can choose which things I care most about in terms of what am I scanning? Is it a particular user? Is it a range of users? Or is it all Cpanel users? So you can do a scan on the entire server it'll take a while if you have a lot of accounts so this is scanning every file of a user so that will take a while you can check off to have it write a log file to a specific area on the server so that you can keep track of it you can have to email that log file to you and under the scan options they've got a whole lot of different things here and some of this looks like gibberish but you can leave it all checked if you find that it's often finding a bunch of false positives it will always tell you which option you thought it was flagging based on so you may find in the past that if I choose Windows binary or executable file there are always false positives and it's never a hacked file so I've often unchecked that one one of the really reliable ones is fingerprint match fingerprint match is absolutely going to find a hacked file it's looking for specific things that it has a database of and when it flags on that one it's something injected in there so that's a very reliable one suspected exploit file it thinks something is right so I always leave it checked but it could have a false positive here and there this is just the scanning options later on down and it can also check for versions this can be a good tool just to see whether or not there's anything floating out there that's an older version than the most current maybe wiki, wordprefs there are several different content management systems for that kind of thing installtron could be a good tool for that as well but this doesn't care about it whether something is an installtron or not if someone installed it manually it's still going to look for the versions so it's looking at the file system itself and says that's a wordprefs site and I looked in the version file and it's an older version so it gives you a heads up and we'll also search for some of the more common plugins and themes there's this version of Jetpack that's out of date and you can see how far out of date it is is it at point one or is it like a whole it's very very old so square version scan is useful virus scan is a little different than the other scanner virus scan is using a piece of software called plan and to do plan A B to do the scanning and so it's just an additional defense rather than just the signatures that it's looking for and that kind of stuff it's an additional virus scanner that's included in this you've got some options here probability scanning and that kind of stuff you can set the quarantine directory that you want to use and then quarantine options so you may decide you just want to scan but you don't want to quarantine anything and that's totally fine if you just want to record this account to see what's going on with it but it's often helpful to go ahead and quarantine things because it can save you from having to delete a whole bunch of files yourself but you can go ahead and quarantine them the thing to be careful of and why it's still useful to get that report and look it over is that if I run this on that mountain and discover account it would have quarantined the WP config file it's on injected code in there and it would have quarantined it and now the site is completely broken because it can't make that database connection so while it can clean out it probably will still break things so it's useful to be able to go back in to un-quarantine it and clean out those things or to at least know what got quarantined so you can get fresh copies of it it may be that it only finds issues in like two of those lists of plugins but that's great for me now I only need two fresh copies of different plugins rather than that longer list of 25 so that can be useful as well where you're looking at that log file and getting information about it and then there's just some final information for whether you want to throttle this so that it doesn't take too many resources on the server running it as a background process and that kind of stuff can I ask you a question about that WP config file so were you trying to tell us to replace that in the STP with the clean install or no we leave that one it's got unique information so we need to go through those two manually and the HTA access to read like go through manually that's right I just want to make sure I got those straight absolutely and I can show you I've got a good example I'm actually open here where I'm running on another server so this is what a scan looks like when it's running through every account on the server and I can see all these accounts, no issues no issues this is the exploit scanner the law from that exploit scanner that was running on all cPanel users so here it found something and it actually turned out that I thought this was bad and it wasn't so I had to un-quarantine that and just move on that one was a false positive but then it started finding stuff that absolutely was bad so these were phishing sites spammers, things like that you know you have an account so you'll often go through a lot of accounts that are clean and then you'll find one that has a bunch of stuff and then you'll have a whole bunch of clean ones and then one or two that have you know several items so it's never bad to do an all-user scan with this here's an example where it found a specific plugin that had issues and it was just this one plugin and so easy enough for me I can grab a clean copy of that one plugin and it solves all those issues because this is just one after another within that same plugin folder all I need to do is replace that one plugin with a fresh copy and I'm good to go so but this is what it looks like you'll find other things in there and you can see here it tells you what the file was it tells you that it quarantined which trigger it was on so whether it was this Bayes exploit scanner the known exploit those were all those options that I was checking in this particular scan that I'm doing I only have specific things checked because I want very low false positives but I wanted to quarantine every single thing that it finds that is not that's not okay so you'll find more in here but it'll always tell you which option that you had checked it's basing its decision off of it so that's the Convixer exploit scan we'll talk a little bit and then we'll get into some of the preventative maintenance and cleaning up afterwards so let's say you ran your scans the site's back online you've replaced all the plugins and themes core WordPress you feel like you're pretty good to go and now you just kind of want to cover your basis you've taken a backup of the site and you just want to kind of cover your basis with like I don't want that to happen again so what kind of things can I do and what kind of things does Reclane do and what kind of solution as well one thing for WordPress that we really like is a plugin called WordPress WordPress has a free version and a premium version I have found that both are worthwhile but the free version definitely gets you somewhere so it's something that I almost always recommend to use install after we've gone through this whole process of cleaning things out you're running a WordPress site and you were hacked it is a great idea to go ahead and get WordPress on there and that way WordPress can do these regular scans within the file system to see if anything has changed it's got a lot of options in there for things like checking every theme and plugin against the repository versions again it can't do the premium stuff but it can check against the open source versions plugins and themes and say hey that file that's in here is not in the main repository do you want us to go ahead and delete it and so it can be doing those regular scans and notify you of that kind of stuff it also does some really nice security things in terms of making sure that people who are making strange requests to your site that they know are trying to break into it they'll block those IP addresses so it's in some ways a firewall as well obviously we have firewalls on the server and other ways that we block this stuff but it never hurts to have it at the application layer as well so WordPress is a great WordPress for the thing to do you know CXS is a really good preventative measure in the same way that you use this for identifying and cleaning up sites you can do regular scans all things but it's also about if I go back from the generate commands option it has two different features here that I want to talk about one is called CXS watch we'll watch every account on your server for new activity and as soon as a file is placed under that account it goes huh that file is interesting let me go ahead and stand it nope and it quarantines it at the time that it gets added to the account so watch is checking for any changes across any account the thing to be careful of of course is false positives you can look at the log for your watch on here but this is a really good preventative maintenance tool to make sure that you know these people are hacking into accounts can't do anything even if they had the FTP credentials and they were adding stuff in there it's getting removed at the moment it's being added you can imagine a support scenario though when someone's saying I'm trying to add stuff to my site and it disappears right after I added could be something like this where it's throwing a false positive so those are you know everything's a double-edged sword in this game right you've got to look for those kind of stuff but it can go a long way towards that preventative maintenance it's also got an FTP scanner so specific to the FTP process if a file is uploaded and sometimes that may not be malicious sometimes it might be your user downloaded a plugin from somewhere not from WordPress somebody told them download this plugin upload it to your site and you'll be good to go and they go to upload it and it did have a virus inside of it because they were on some random blog post or whatever this can look inside of every file that's uploaded by FTP and say yeah that's got injected code go ahead and quarantine that file so these are some good preventative things that come with CXS that can keep the server secure so that you're not having to go back and clean the pack sites that it's kind of doing some of that for you on the on set the last thing I do want to talk a little bit more about WordPress hardening with almost all schools and I would probably say at this point all schools WordPress is the most popular content management system PowerZip over 26 I don't know what the number is at percent of the web at this point it's a huge target it is probably not the only reason that sites get hacked but it's a big reason in keeping those things up to date and secure steps that you can take to hard and WordPress and make sure that you don't run into issues one of them is almost every hack attempt to try and log in is going to go to a site with .wp.pabmin at the end so this is a plugin called WPS hard login it allows the user to set their own custom login URL to be something like slash secure slash login slash Tim it doesn't really matter what it is but you can set in the plugin what you want your login URL to be and that way when people go to slash wp.pabmin they get a 404 page and scripts don't know what to do with that they're like okay I guess I can't get in at that point so that is a really good step because users can't get in there WordPress has a lot of options like I mentioned with the firewall blocking IP addresses and traffic like that if you install that plugin from the myapps page is that URL still reflected that's not going to be reflected but the WPF and in myapps will still work it's not actually going to that URL the way the way installatron works is that it's dropping a PHP file obviously it has accessible file system it's dropping a PHP file into the WP content folder and then using that to authenticate the user get them in and then it deletes that PHP file you may see this file at some point depending like if you've got a user still transferring their site or something because the file name is like delete me with a bunch of like characters it's like delete me dot PHP and it looks suspicious like I've seen this before and what that is is if the file didn't get deleted because they couldn't authenticate the user we see it if somebody goes to install WordPress and get in there before their domains transferred completely or before the domain got registered there was some issue but they were trying to get in well it's adding that file and then it's going but that's how it's getting in and since it's going through the WP content folder it's while it shows that admin link it's not actually using WordPress's WP admin functions and all to get in there are these good things to do to your site anything or do you think it's overkill? I do not think it's overkill no it's just being smart yeah absolutely if they have, if you're not overwhelming the user like obviously some noobs I would not give them a lot of extra stuff to do but if they've got a prominent site no and I'm big on the low overhead ones I'm not going to go into some of the hardening where you change WordPress's folder structure because it's possible to do that it's possible to have separate folders and now you don't even have a WP content folder you're telling it to look here for this and there for that it's a really way to have a strong WordPress install because all of these hackers are relying on your install functioning like a normal install that's the only way they can get a lot of hits when they're trying to find exploits so anything that you do to breach away from the norm is going to help you fly under the radar with this stuff but that's very difficult to set up you have to do HT access rules you have to change core WordPress files to say look here for this now look there for that now change this database thing to go here there are ways to do all of that and I'm not much more fan of things like just hiding the login just making sure that your username is not admin for the longest time where WordPress's default username was admin and so a lot of scripts will hit a ton of logins with the username admin if you don't have that username you're fine, you're good to go so the last thing I know we're coming up on an hour and this is a ton of information but it's important stuff I want to talk about is a service that we use called BitNinja this is a service I don't know when we started over a year ago, a year and a half now we started using them BitNinja is very much a firewall but it's a distributed firewall we subscribe to their service with all of our servers and there are obviously other subscribers out there and it's monitoring all of the traffic across all of those servers so if somebody's trying to hack into one on shared hosting accounts and their IP address gets blocked there every single one of your servers it gets blocked on as well and that's the same for every BitNinja customer so it's monitoring traffic it's a global blacklist and greylist and where it's monitoring traffic across all of the servers that are running BitNinja and then you benefit from that larger list of IP addresses it blocks a ton of malicious traffic before it can even get to the server it can't touch your WordPress install because it can't load anything it knows all those Chinese and Russian sites exactly, yeah it's a huge list of it it comes again with false positives so they have two options there's a blacklist that we can go in and do if they haven't flagged it and I find out that there's a hacker on a specific ID I can blacklist that address there's also a greylist and when something is greylisted they get a caption page so you may occasionally see a page that says are you a real user put in this, you know, string and then they put in the string and they're good to go and that's coming from BitNinja it's just a way to verify that we found some suspicious stuff with your IP address users might run into this if they're on Starbucks Wi-Fi for example that IP address might have a history that it's not their history but they were given an IP address that got flagged at some point in the past we see this with VPNs somebody logs in through a VPN VPNs are, you know, a nice hot thing for academics to use but they also have a history of being used for not so great thing purposes and so a lot of IP addresses through VPNs have a history through BitNinja to where they will get greylisted hopefully you get a caption page if you just can't get anything to load through that we can whitelist IPs and IP ranges through BitNinja as well so question about the servers so when NYU converts over to digital ocean are those servers also like are those just like your servers now so that they have this NYU has it already it's not specific to digital ocean it's a separate service that we just install and run on our servers is it already part of the future? that's correct, yeah additional costs for this made the decision that we were just going to run it on everything it reduces the load on the server, it reduces the number of, you know, malicious hacks and things of that nature BitNinja has additional tools that we haven't quite taken advantage of things like a web application firewall where we'll actually monitor the kinds of traffic and activity that are happening and try to block that in real time we tread a little bit carefully because as I'm showing you there's a lot of layers to this you turn on all those layers you're going to get a whole lot of false positives and so, you know, we are mostly using that for the firewall stuff and I can actually show you it's kind of wild to look at but you can see the activity happening in real time with what it's blocking now we have access to this there's likely a way that I can get you all access to your individual server into it but let's go to the server and I can go into incidents and this is all the traffic that it's right now been blocking so somebody tried to get to that URL and said somebody tried to get to this one their IP address had a mystery so this means it's showing a capture page to all of these users and if it's a script it can't fill that out so it's not doing anything they also recently added something where it's called a smart capture it tries to figure out if the user would be able to fill it out and it's likely a good user it doesn't even show the capture page it does a little like that and then it passes them on through and so they're trying to get away even from requiring the user to level it is that an X or a P or something like that and just do some more real time figuring out is this a real user will sometimes still see the capture page but they're trying to move towards using some sophisticated tools to figure out whether it's likely that they probably are a real user or not this is the activity across all of our servers and everything is seen that's suspicious that's right you can see the different things it also says things like honey pots where it's trying to attract specific types of URL structures and things for users and if someone hits it they're like yeah that never existed on the server and now I know that you were looking for it and it blocks your IP address so it's called a honey pot yeah the gray list is the global gray list of course those patches so these IPs are going to be captured so we're often in here looking at IPs for folks that they've been blocked of course we check the config server firewall but we also check bit ninja and so we'll white list IP addresses in here as well and IP ranges for your canvas can be white listed completely in bit ninja so that they don't affect anybody yeah that's the activity across all of our servers this is specific for that BYU server BYU 3 server and I mean you can see I'm scrolling through here and this is just still November 3rd this is the last 30 minutes yeah so yeah yeah you can start to sound like a temp oil crazy when it comes to security but then you see stuff like this and you realize oh wow servers are getting hammered by this stuff and that's why we really love this tool because it's taking care of a lot of that before it's even getting to the application you can do a lot on the application side and even at the server side but if they can't even get there that's the best we're a residential campus even with faculty on sabbatical or study abroad or tour browser or VPNs I've run the access logs and geo reference the IP addresses periodically


Okay guys and welcome back to MPSco's life festival so we're joined with the beautiful Keith and his really nice tutu here who's in charge of the Holy Festival that's going to be taking place in 4 o'clock is it? 4.30 starting. 4.30 it's going to start of 4.30 here at the side of the main a district date stage here at life and so Keith why did you decide to bring the Holy Festival into life which is in itself another festival? Kind of bothered and kind of clicked together you know and it's kind of clientele that we've been looking for and I think I'm ready for it. And do you think you're going to have more Holy Festivals because there's been some in the past like fun ones? Well it's got to be a huge one now we have one on things between 10, 15,000 27th of June that's what our list is. What? Yeah so 27th of June the Ivy Grounds. Ivy Grounds? Um so yeah it's going to be about 10, 15,000 people at it and it's probably one of the fastest selling old festivals at the moment that's about 70% sold out already and it's people that want to go. Brilliant. So it's huge. That's fantastic and do you think there's going to be a big tour now for the festival? Yeah a lot of people are going to be here they're going to be curious you know we're getting a lot of people coming over asking what it is and you know people have seen on Facebook on the TV and heard about it so yeah there's a lot of people curiosity and then most people then will come on so 27th of June. Yeah perfect so the main one is going on the 27th of June so make sure to check that out and finally why do you think it's important to have cultural events such as this at a typically music festival but I think life is going into a more cultural type of festival. It is it is yeah it's you need stuff like that you know you know you do the same thing over and over for years and now it's just you need to get out there try different things and and says the culture is changing around Ireland so it's time to change with it. Absolutely brilliant answer. Well thank you so much for talking to us and have a great time we'll be here at the festival later on. See you then.


DK Audio presents 13 and a half incredible things you need to know about everything, read by Alex Wingfield. What will you hear? Find out things you never knew you needed to know in this catalogue of curiosities. From bees to blood. Money to mummies. Each entry offers up 13 and a half incredible facts. Keep listening to hear where you'll go next. How did earth? Earth came into being about 4.6 billion years ago. This huge spinning ball of rock and metal is not as rigid as it seems. The surface of our planet is constantly changing as continents collide, mountains rise up and oceans widen. 1. The ground may feel firm beneath your feet, but earth's rigid outer layer, the crust, is only a few kilometres thick in places. This rocky surface makes up just 1% of earth's total volume. 2. The crust is broken into pieces called tectonic plates, which fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. However, unlike jigsaw pieces, these plates are constantly on the move, shifting around and crashing into each other. 3. Earth's largest layer, the mantle, is about 2,900 kilometres, 1,800 miles thick. The tectonic plates float on the mantle, which is made of solid rock but flows very slowly due to the extreme temperature and pressure. 4. Wrapped around the centre of our planet, the outer core is a liquid layer of iron and nickel. These swirling metals create earth's magnetic field. 5. Tectonic plates all move at different rates, and the Nazca plate, the plate to the west of South America, is the fastest. Every year it moves approximately 8 centimetres, 3 inches, about half as fast as hair grows. 6. Earthquakes and volcanoes often happen along plate boundaries. One such hotspot is the East African Rift, where the African plate is slowly splitting in two. Eventually, a new ocean will fill the ever-widening gap. 7. Earth's continents were once joined together in a single landmass known as Pangaea. Scientists predict that in about 250 million years, the continents will merge once more. 8. Every other planet in our solar system is named after a Greek or Roman god except ours. The word earth comes from the Anglo-Saxon word erda, which means ground or soil, and is thought to be 1,000 years old. 9. The inner core is made mostly of iron. At 5,000 to 6,000 degrees Celsius, 9,000 to 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit, it's about as scorching as the sun. There is so much pressure at the centre of earth that, despite the heat, the inner core is solid. 10. If you could dig a tunnel through earth from one side to the other, it would be 12,756 kilometers, 7,926 miles long. In reality, the deepest tunnel ever dug, the Kola Superdeep borehole in Russia, barely scratches the surface at 12 kilometers, 7.5 miles deep. 11. Mountains are formed along the boundaries of tectonic plates. The longest mountain range of all, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, is hidden deep in the ocean. It was formed by plates pulling apart, causing hot magma to erupt from the mantle and mould into stiff peaks. 12. Forget sun and sand, the world's biggest desert. Sample complete. Ready to continue?


Right now in South Dakota, we're supposed to have one of the lowest pheasant numbers ever. It's not true on our land. My brother and I have always treated the opening day of pheasant season, which is the third Saturday in October here in South Dakota. We always treated it as a national holiday. If we were combining corn or beans or whatever, we always shut down the combine and we went pheasant hunting. And we had high school friends and college friends and we usually got at least a dozen, maybe up to 18 guys that would show up. And there was a time there when we couldn't find very many pheasants anymore. And so we started making an effort to leave something on the farm for the pheasants. And the first thing we did is we put some curved edges along the Big Sioux River into food plots. And that grew to the point where we actually had 15 acres of food plots that were either next to the river or close by. And then we took the waterways in our pastures and we put those into CRP. And then that's when we turned our CRP ground that was former crop land. We turned that into our pastures so we changed the landscape entirely. And right now in South Dakota we're supposed to have one of the lowest pheasant numbers ever. It's not true on our land. We got the birds.