IT OPERATIONS

Amelia Kinsinger

A website crash takes many forms. For example, WordPress Security Specialist Stefan Ristić recently helped a theater nonprofit deal with the slings and arrows of a 503 error (which indicate temporarily unavailable servers, often due to an overload of requests).

“For a few hours the site worked fine. Then, for a few hours, it did not work because the server could not serve those requests from the visitors. It was basically clogged with a ton of requests,” Ristić, also the founder of domain security research project TLDWP, told us.

Root of the issue.—BH

      

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They’re already at your digital door. Which ones will you let in?

The HUMAN Iris Report: CISO and CMO Perspectives on Agentic Traffic Visibility found that 98% of CMOs know AI agents are visiting their sites, but only 4% can quantify them.

This visibility gap has consequences. Agent traffic can shape marketing performance, customer journeys, and security risk. Without knowing who’s behind the traffic, teams are left making decisions with incomplete data.

Capturing perspectives from 100 CMOs and CISOs, the report shows what leaders can measure today, where their visibility gaps remain, and what they would change with better information.

Learn what CMOs and CISOs can actually measure.

SOFTWARE

Morning Brew Inc.

Embedding a “place order” button on your site requires just a few lines of code, but don’t be fooled by the simplicity: behind the simple icon is the opportunity for lots of clickable chaos.

Initiating an online purchase sets off a chain of interactions, including tasks as diverse as asset management, forecasting, payment processing, delivery, and fraud protection. The button also adds to a company’s set of responsibilities.

“Do you understand it changes the nature of your business? Do you understand inventory and logistics management?” Aaron Hutten, CTO at digital commerce consultancy Studio Science, said. “Do you understand that you have to grow year over year and that your site or your app is going to be a living and breathing entity the second [the button is] turned on?”

Pick me up.—BH

      

CYBERSECURITY

Shannon May

When it comes to managing certificate inventory, IT pros need to be aware of the importance of a changing environment—and identities.

Many organizations and enterprises are facing challenges in keeping up with a rapidly changing and evolving certification space.

But changes in certificate inventory validity adds a sense of chaos to how teams approach management, said RapidScale CISO Brent Neal.

“You can’t use a person to go run through all the hundreds or thousands of certificates you may have—it’s becoming unfeasible,” Neal said. “That’s where I see where we are right now in the certificate management world, a little bit of chaos on what we need to do, and that does lead to knock-on effects for security.”

Manage it.—EH

      

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 52%. That’s how much of SpaceX’s business income comes from its AI business. (TechCrunch)

Quote: “Step one, solve intelligence. Step two, solve everything else.”—Demis Hassabis, DeepMind co-founder, on why he started the company (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: A crypto detective tracks a scam back to her own family. (Wired)

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