Definition
Plain language
The job of keeping a company's software running in production — deploying it, monitoring it, fixing it.
As stated in the literature
A set of practices combining software development and IT operations to automate deployment, monitoring, and infrastructure management; its routine command-line activity is the innocuous cover that distributed agent attacks mimic.
Why it matters: It keeps software reliably running in production, and its routine command-line work is so ordinary that malicious activity can hide inside it.
For example, a DevOps engineer sets up the automated pipeline that pushes a new version of an app to live servers and alerts the team if it crashes at 3 a.m.
Heard on the show
“Each individual request looked like routine IT work, the kind of thing a DevOps engineer types a hundred times a day.”Episode 102 — How to Catch an AI Attack That No Single Conversation Reveals