Categorized Directory

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Search directory
  • Web crawlers
  • Collect data
  • Indexation
  • Bankroll

Categorized Directory

Header Banner

Categorized Directory

  • Home
  • Search directory
  • Web crawlers
  • Collect data
  • Indexation
  • Bankroll
Web crawlers
Home›Web crawlers›Recent Facebook outage highlights vulnerability of smart buildings

Recent Facebook outage highlights vulnerability of smart buildings

By Ed Robertson
October 10, 2021
0
0


Facebook is one of the world’s tech giants. The company is worth nearly a trillion dollars. Almost half of the planet’s inhabitants, 3.5 billion, regularly use one of Facebook’s applications, including Instagram and WhatsApp. They are at the forefront of the technological revolution and have been a driving force behind many major changes in our society, both good and bad. But for five hours on Monday, all of their global operations were frozen, anyone who typed facebook.com into their web browser was automatically notified that “this site is not accessible.”

Many suspected that the company had been hacked. The outage came just hours after a 60-minute segment aired featuring a whistleblower who claimed the company knew their platform was causing disinformation and hate speech, but failed to do so. much to reduce them. But an official statement later said the problem was caused by a faulty configuration change in the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is the way ISPs share routing information, so the error essentially removed the map telling computers and cellphones where to find the images of food, cat memes, and news ( real and false) for which the company is known. Several domain registration sites even put the facebook.com domain up for sale when their automated crawlers discovered that the site had apparently expired.

It’s not just the users who have been banned from Facebook. Employees said they couldn’t even enter the building because their badges no longer worked. This was probably one of the reasons the site was down for so long.

Not only are Facebook’s services and applications inaccessible to the public, but its internal tools and communication platforms, including Workplace, are also available. No one can do any work. Several people I spoke to told me it was the equivalent of a “snow day” at the company.

– Ryan Mac 🙃 (@ RMac18) October 4, 2021

So how did this happen? “This is what happens when systems are not properly segmented,” said Charles Meyers. He worked as the Chief Technical Architect for Wells Fargo for almost twenty years and his work integrating their workplace technology led him to launch the Real Estate Cyber ​​Consortium last year. “I felt like Chicken Little,” he said. “I kept telling our team that our office technology was a vulnerability, but most people didn’t believe me. ”

It wasn’t until he walked through a new office with the company’s IT manager that he finally delivered his message: “I asked him how he planned to handle the system’s ghost networks and he didn’t. kept saying “there are no networks on our system that i don’t know of. Then i drove him to a switch and told him he was running on a completely outside Zigbee protocol. our architecture, then he understood the threat.

Facebook’s cybersecurity concerns with their physical office are not unique. There is often a disconnect between a company’s IT departments and the building’s operational technology (OT) personnel, which can lead to a ‘not my problem’ mentality. It can also be due to the way construction systems are outsourced. “The team that installs and configures building systems are typically not the people who maintain them,” Meyers said. “Installers usually have an administrator account, but then create an operator account once they are done so that the administrator is never updated.” This can lead to laughable and disastrous oversights like guessable usernames like “admin” and predictable passwords like “password”.

See also

Part of the solution, Meyers believes, is to have an industry-wide partnership to help standardize protocols and best practices. “If enough users and suppliers come together and demand a certain level of security, anyone else creating or maintaining building systems will have to comply,” he explained.

Increased cybersecurity monitoring of the construction system could also affect the relationship between landlord and tenant. Smart occupants can spend as much time analyzing and controlling a building’s digital systems as they spend on its physical properties. Building engineers will need to become familiar with their tenants’ IT practices, and IT departments will need to better understand how operating technology fits into their system architecture.

When Facebook went down, the internet erupted with people exclaiming that the world was a better place without it. Whether the company is a net positive for society is still up for debate, but what is clear is that Facebook’s high-profile tech issues have taught the world l ‘interconnectivity of the internal technology of companies and their offices. Facebook’s pains had self-inflicted, but embarrassing as it could be, it could have been a lot worse. How long before you see another global tech giant shot by a thermostat or switch with a “temporary” password?



Related posts:

  1. Which platform is right for you?
  2. SEO: what is it and how it works
  3. Empathy app helps grieving people complete tasks
  4. Web Scraper Software Market To Gain USD 948.60 Million At

Categories

  • Bankroll
  • Collect data
  • Indexation
  • Search directory
  • Web crawlers

Recent Posts

  • NOAA research vessel collects data for boating safety and coral preservation | New
  • Compliance Alert: IRS Releases Affordability Percentage Adjustment for 2023 | woodruff sawyer
  • Yoast SEO 19.5 update causes fatal errors
  • SEO for Animated GIFs – Practical Ecommerce
  • VSD and Department of Statistics collect data on chicken supply

Archives

  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions