E50 - Pavel Odinstov at FastNetMon LTD

On our 50th episode of The Route to Networking podcast, James Dean had the pleasure of being joined by Pavel Odinstov Co-Founder and CTO at FastNetMon LTD. Pavel is a Software Engineer with a passion for computer networks, with his work being orientated around delivering affordable DDoS protection. During this episode, they delve into everything DDoS-related, involving the biggest changes that Pavel has seen in this space during his career, as well as some of the main concerns he has for the industry as well.

Since he was young, he always had a curiosity about taking things apart to see what was inside and then assembling them back together. This is what led him to do a degree in Automated Control & Data Processing Systems.

His degree played a huge part in his career today as his first semester taught him a lot of the basics, which are essential to understand how computers work. It’s really something everybody needs to learn before entering the Networking space. He found during his career a lot of deep tech areas which you wouldn’t be able to just Google.

Some of the biggest changes he has seen in the Cyber Security space has been the rise in DDoS attacks. The rise has become more prevalent over the years and is destroying businesses across the world.

Due to the rise in DDoS attacks, cloud infrastructure service providers are struggling with this new threat. There are multiple options to defend against volumetric DDoS attacks such as BGP Blackhole also known as RTBH, automated BGP-based prefix diversion to Cloud DDoS Scrubbing centres and BGP Flow Spec-based filtering which is supported by many modern routers.

More on FastNetMon…

FastNetMon specialises in DDoS attack detection and mitigation. They have collected all their knowledge in different areas to provide better protection to their customers. Their customers are one of their key values. They have many plans for development in the future such as making deployment faster. So, some very exciting times are ahead for the team at FastNetMon.

Working in the Security space comes with many trials and tribulations, many things can go wrong and they are constantly on the lookout for attacks. Pavel talks about his biggest Networking disaster since joining the industry… And funnily enough, it was not technology related. At one of his old companies, all the Network Engineers left without any notice. He was the CTO at the time so was not the person who did the Network Engineering. It was the most stressful few months of his life as he not only had to do his CTO role but had to work on the Network Engineering side as well.

Pavel shares his best piece of advice to anyone looking to enter the industry and the importance of focusing on things that will not change in 10 years’ time. Listen now to hear the full episode.