And that's a wrap for the first half of 2023. How are your new year's resolutions coming along? If you're a hacker, you're probably patting yourself on the back for checking all the boxes. The rest of us, maybe not so much.

Not a hack (as far as we know), but our top story for June was the AWS US-East-1 regional outage from the 13th. It only lasted a couple of hours, but the effects were widespread — taking down both Amazon's online customer service and sites like the New York Times and the Associate Press, as well as mobile apps like Taco Bell. Ironically, it happened during the AWS re:Inforce security conference (awkward!).

Our second most-read story last month was a tale worthy of its own docudrama series: the re-acquisition (or is it re-re-acquisition?) of networking vendor Riverbed. Contributing writer Sean Michael Kerner explores the long and winding road that Riverbed has taken in its two decades of business.

And as with every month, SASE, 5G and sustainability are top of mind and on our Top 10 list. Check it out here. Rankings are based on unique visitors aggregated during the month.

1. AWS US-EAST-1 Region outage downed many websites, now resolved

According to AWS, the root cause of the issue was traced to “a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda.”

2. Riverbed gets acquired (again) — a tale of bankruptcy, SD-WAN fails and network-acceleration strengths

Vector Capital is acquiring Riverbed; this new ownership is just the latest step in the company's ongoing saga.

3. Cisco boosts network assurance and observability with Accedian acquisition

Cisco will link Accedian’s network performance and user experience monitoring services into Cisco's ThousandEyes network assurance platform.

4. Why Cisco, Intel and Dell are leading open RAN influencers

As their influence grows it could impact how they continue to operate within what is hoped to be an open ecosystem.

5. Apple’s Vision Pro might be the first to fully use 5G tech — or not

Apple's Vision Pro could be an inflection point in the virtual reality, Augmented Reality and extended reality space.

6. How the industry can kickstart 5G open RAN adoption

“The reality is that there is just a couple of large operators right now that are driving the market,” Dell'Oro Group's Stefan Pongratz said.

7. US federal agencies hit by cyberattack — what you need to know about MOVEit

Mandiant warns any organization that used MOVEit in May 2023 could have potentially been exploited by the threat actor — CL0P.

8. Cisco goes all in on security with security services edge (SSE), generative AI-powered SOC, Cloud Native Application Protection Platform and firewalls

Cisco Secure Access is designed to provide “secure access to any Application for any user from any device from any network,” EVP Jeetu Patel said.

9. How to move from VPN to ZTNA (3 best practices)

Advice for how to move from a legacy VPN architecture to a more modern zero-trust network access model.

10. Have Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom found a way to secure 5G network slicing?

The single management interface can automate “configuration, provisioning and end-to-end orchestration of the Enterprise slicing service order.”