Once again, Platformer has got to scoop on what’s happening inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. In today’s episode, the have details about today’s Twitter’s latest dirt nap. And it illustrates the effects of Elon’s cost cutting measures:
But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.
Elon Musk was furious, we’re told.
“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of the old Twitter for a reason.
“There’s so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” one current employee says.
Still, when Musk took over the company, he promised to dramatically improve the speed and stability of the site. His associates screened the existing staff for their technical prowess, ultimately cutting thousands of workers who were deemed not “technical” enough to succeed under Musk’s leadership.
But nonstop layoffs have left the company with under 550 full-time engineers, we’re told. And just as former employees have predicted from the start, the losses have made Twitter increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic outages.
Yeah. Elon’s got a major problem on his hands. He’s basically backed himself into a corner where he doesn’t have the resources to run Twitter and keep it stable. And there’s no clear path for him to exit that corner. Which basically means that we need to buckle up as things are about to get even more turbulent than they already are in the Twitterverse.
EPA To Require States To Report Public Water System Cyber Threats
Posted in Commentary with tags Security on March 6, 2023 by itnerdOn Friday the White House said it would require states to report on cyber threats noted in their audit reports of public water systems. This comes a day after they released their new cybersecurity strategy:
The Environmental Protection Agency said public water systems are increasingly at risk from cyberattacks that amount to a threat to public health.
“Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure facilities, including drinking water systems, are increasing, and public water systems are vulnerable,” said EPA Assistant Administrator Radhika Fox. “Cyberattacks have the potential to contaminate drinking water.”
Fox said the EPA would assist states and water systems in building out cybersecurity programs, adding that states could begin using EPA’s guidance in their audits right away. The agency did not respond immediately to questions about enforcement deadlines.
Public water systems could be easy targets for hackers and with minimal security attention/funding might act as a front door to ransomware attacks not unlike the recent attack on Oakland, CA.
Jan Lovmand, CTO of BullWall had this to say:
“Often forgotten in the battle to prevent cyber attacks, physical municipal infrastructure such as public water supplies can provide an open attack surface for hackers, as evidenced by 2021 attack on a Florida water supply. The EPA Assistant Administrator, Radhika Fox, noted that a threat to public water systems is also a threat to public health, as cyber-attacks have the potential to contaminate drinking water and said that it is essential to address the cybersecurity of these systems as a top priority to protect public health.
“The cyber risk to public water systems is not just due to their connectivity to government networks, as it could be just as easy to shut down a city by controlling their water supply as any other aspect of their infrastructure. Municipalities that do not prioritize cybersecurity and do not have robust protections in place are at higher risk of falling victim to these types of attacks.
“The White House is proposing that states report on cyber threats noted in their audit reports of public water systems and the EPA is offering guidance to states to assist them in building out their water supply cybersecurity programs. However, given the critical importance of these systems to public health and safety, municipalities had best prioritize cybersecurity investments now, to prevent cyber-attacks and safeguard their water supplies.”
David Brunsdon, Threat Intelligence, Security Engineer at Hyas follows up with this comment:
“Water systems utilize a significant amount of automation and are monitored simultaneously by the control systems, and human operators. Like in Florida, 2021, threat actors could misuse the system to introduce chemicals to the water. A more sophisticated attack would be covert and would obfuscate the changes from both the plant operators and automated monitoring systems.
“Municipal governments and water treatment plants are vulnerable to well-funded nation-state actors, and so protecting water systems should be considered a national security concern.”
This is a good move by the EPA and I hope this leads to an improvement in terms of the security of these facilities. Because really bad things could happen if these facilities don’t up their game.
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