Last week, the government of the border town Mission, Texas, declared a state of emergency after a February 28th cyberattack exposed all of the data held on city systems. The mayor made a statement on this situation:
The City of Mission, Texas, has suffered a cybersecurity incident such that the entire City computer server is at severe risk of a cyberattack that could release protected personal information, protected health information, civil and criminal records, and/or any and all other data held by the City of Mission and all departments within the City.
I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that extraordinary measures must be taken to alleviate the immeasurable and imminent cybersecurity incident. Pursuant to §418.00 of the Texas Government Code, I am requesting that you declare a state of emergency for City of Mission, Texas, and issue appropriate directives to deal with the emergency.
Furthermore, I am asking that successive proclamations be issued and remain in effect until the threat is contained.
Mission is located in Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.
Willy Leichter, CMO, AppSOC: AI governance and application security expert had this to say:
“Local government agencies are especially vulnerable to cyberattacks, and the impact can be as severe as any other type of physical emergency. When disaster strikes it’s reasonable to expect help from the state or even federal government. But this aid should focus just as much on prevention as recovery. Waiting for disasters and then scrambling to figure out what to do is a recipe for much more severe damage and higher costs. Unfortunately, from the top down, federal cyber protections are being dismantled which will inevitably put states and local governments at greater risk, and citizens will pay the price for greater damage.”
Yogita Parulekar, CEO Invi Grid follows with this:
“This is not the first and will not be the last. Cities and counties must prepare themselves for this actively and urgently. Having business continuity for emergency services such as policing, fire, water, any healthcare as well as disaster recovery so that city services do not remain shut off for long periods is critical.”
This may not be the first time that a situation like this has happened, but declaring a state of emergency is as non trivial as something like this can get. This should serve as an example that if you get pwned by a threat actor, things can and often will get very bad for you. Thus you should put in as much time and effort to make sure that you don’t end up in a situation like this.
Twitter Is Back Up….. But That’s Only The Start Of The Story
Posted in Commentary with tags Twitter on March 10, 2025 by itnerdEarlier today, Twitter was down. As in it wasn’t working for anyone. And this went on for hours. But in the last hour it came back up. And as I type this, it seems to be mostly working. Though its not completely stable. At the time I said that Twitter themselves had not said anything about the outage. But that changed with this:
Now, you have to take anything that Elon says with a grain of salt because he loves to play fast and loose with the truth. But let’s pretend that he’s telling the truth in this case. This is a massive escalation in terms of forms of protest against Elon. Besides that, a cyberattack against Twitter would not be beyond the realm of possibility. Specifically a DDoS or a Distributed Denial of Service attack which I think is what Elon is getting at in his Tweet. If that’s true, then the level of traffic that would have to be directed at Twitter to take them down should be easy to spot. Thus we’ll get to the bottom of Elon’s claims soon enough.
Needless to say, this is still potentially a developing story and updates are sure to come.
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