News of the Cyber World

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Elon Musk ‘Not Super Worried’ Amid Reports Twitter Offices Closed

Amid reports that numerous Twitter employees quit the company on Thursday, new owner Elon Musk wrote the social media firm has seen all-time high in traffic.

Anonymously sourced reports said that a new batch of Twitter employees quit the company, prompting widespread speculation on the platform that it would shut down and fail on Thursday. As of Friday, Twitter was still online, although DownDetector.com showed that some Twitter users were reporting problems with the website on Thursday night.
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The Tesla and SpaceX CEO also suggested that he was not worried about resignations because “the best people are staying.” Later, he wrote: “Record numbers of users are logging in to see if Twitter is dead, ironically making it more alive than ever!”

Musk did not publicly address claims that Twitter workers quit en masse on Thursday. It was prompted by a reported ultimatum from Musk to work “extremely hardcore” or quit the firm.

Musk’s email asked workers to click “yes” if they wanted to stay around. But those who did not respond by 5 p.m. ET on Thursday would be considered to have quit and were given a severance package, the email said, according to Reuters. The Epoch Times has contacted Twitter for comment on the reports.

Those reports prompted speculation from mainstream media outlets that the social media site will be permanently shut down as some journalists alleged that the company temporarily closed its office and suspended badge access to workers.

Over 110 Twitter employees across several nations announced their decision to leave in public Twitter posts, according to a Reuters report. However, those resignations could not be independently verified by Reuters. Some 15 employees, many in advertisement sales, posted their intention to stay at the company.

Senate Democrats call on FTC to investigate Twitter's data security

A group of Senate Democrats including Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are calling on Federal Trade Commission to investigate potential security issues at Twitter since Elon Musk purchased and took over the company late last month.

In a letter to the FTC sent Thursday, lawmakers expressed concerns that the company may be in violation of consumer protection laws as well as in breach of a 2011 agreement the company reached with the agency over repeated security failures.

Lawmakers’ top concerns related to how Musk rolled out Twitter’s verification services to all paying users, a move that experts warned could further exacerbate the platform’s issues with disinformation and financial scams. Fraudsters immediately used the service, Twitter Blue, to create accounts to impersonate corporations and individuals and spread fake news. Washington Post reporters were even able to create a verified account impersonating Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., one of the letter’s signatories.
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Twitter was already under increased lawmaker scrutiny prior to the finalization of Musk’s purchase after its former chief information security officer, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the company had misled regulators, consumers and its own board members about its security performance.

Earlier this year, Twitter agreed to pay $150 million to settle a separate case with the FTC and Department of Justice that found Twitter violated its 2011 consent decree by misleading users about how it was using phone numbers collected to verify their accounts.

An internal message from a lawyer at Twitter, obtained by The Verge, suggested that Musk wasn’t deterred by the threat of legal action and that “Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them.”

Iranian hackers use Log4Shell to mine crypto on federal computer system

Hackers with connections to the Iranian government broke into a U.S. government agency’s network in early 2022, utilizing a well-known flaw in an open-source software library to install cryptocurrency mining software and compromise credentials, federal cybersecurity officials said Wednesday.

By exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerability, the Iranian-backed hackers broke into an an unpatched VMware Horizon server in February and then used that access to move laterally within the network of an unidentified federal agency, according to Wednesday’s joint advisory from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the affected agency was U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.
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Organizations still running vulnerable versions of Log4j should assume they’ve been breached, CISA and the FBI said in the Wednesday advisory. 

Iranian hacking groups have relied on unpatched versions of log4j to gain access to a wide variety of sensitive U.S. systems. In February, Iranian hackers gained access to a U.S. aerospace company and the computer systems of a municipal government by using the vulnerability, according to a September advisory from U.S. and allied cybersecurity agencies. That advisory attributed the activity to groups with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.