TWITTER Self-Awareness (NOT)

I just saw this on my feed today:

I guess they did not see the announcement by Siemens (or the Tweet about the same) that they were shutting down their Twitter feed. Or maybe they are trying to convince Siemens to stay on Twitter by increasing the number of followers that they have. Or, maybe Twitter is just clueless.

On a side note. I did not ‘follow’ the Siemens feed, @ProductCERT. With the algorithms that TWITTER used their infrequent posts got lost in the social noise. Instead, I searched their feed every day for new notifications about their advisories and updates. I continue to do this for a number of Twitter users.

CISA Consolidates Twitter Accounts

Today, CISA published a formal notice confirming what they have been saying on TWITTER for a couple of days now, they are consolidating their TWITTER accounts. One of the casualties is the @ICSCERT feed.

Back on Monday, @ICSCERT Tweeted:

 There is some dated information in that Tweet, in today’s announcement CISA says that: “@USCERT_gov Twitter account is now renamed @CISACyber”. If you go to @USCERT.gov, you get informed that: “This account is no longer active. Follow @CISAgov and @CISACyber”. Some confusion, but @ICS-CERT is dead.

This action has met with some resistance from the ICS community. Dale Patterson’s comment did not make it into that thread, he pointed out that: “Very troubling that the decision makers at DHS are thinking this make sense. It's not like DHS isn't getting and spending a lot of money purportedly to focus on ICS.”

With the ongoing decline of TWITTER as an infosec resource because of the changes that Musk has been making on the platform since his purchase, this may be a storm in a teapot. Maybe the larger question is when will CISA (and the rest of the federal government) starts to move off of TWITTER? Here is a suggestion, CISA ought to establish an instance on Mastodon where they can control the rules about their conversations without worrying about the changing political whims of private sector owners.

Mastodon Coverage

With the potential changes being made to TWITTER, I have decided to set up presence on an alternative site for advertising my blog posts and tracking various news feeds. You can now follow me @Pjcoyle on Mastodon. I will continue posting on TWITTER pending further evaluation of changes on that site.

Legislative Advertising

On a number of occasions I have noted that Greenpeace does a much better job than the chemical industry does of using the relatively new social networking tools to spread the word about their opinions on pending CFATS legislation. I have suggested that the chemical industry ought to expand their use of these communications tools for political advertising purposes. Well, someone appears to have caught on (not necessarily to my suggestion); yesterday a couple of interesting Tweets were seen from two different accounts from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (chamberpost and uschamber). Both tweets said:

“How could a proposed chemical security bill force you to lose your next turn? Find out Tuesday, Nov. 16.”

There was no link to a web page, so I don’t know what they are actually talking about; I guess that we’ll have to wait until Tuesday. Maybe we’ll see something come out on YouTube…

I couldn’t find any retweets, so its hard to gauge the impact, but it is a start in expanding their use of social networking. It would be more effective if others in the industry would pass the word along via retweets, but that will take a little education, a little practice.

Administrative Note – Twitter Coverage

I have opened up a Twitter Account (PJCoyle) and will post a twit when I post a blog entry here or on my personal blog on MySpace. For those of you on-the-go types that have to stay connected, here is a new tool. We’ll see how it works out.