New Twitter CEO Elon Musk had been aggressively cutting costs since he acquired the company in October 2022, claiming that the company could collapse if he had not done so. Much of this had been accomplished by retrenching huge numbers of staff. Meanwhile, Musk's controversial moves to restore banned accounts had eliminated a host of key advertisers, causing its main source of revenue - advertising earnings - to plummet as they suspended their advertising activities on the platform. To pivot away from the firm's over-reliance on advertising revenue, Twitter had begun backing all things related to cryptocurrencies. First, it allowed cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets to run advertisements. It subsequently facilitated discussions about cryptocurrencies on its platform and allowed users to tip content creators with Ether. The company further allowed users of its Twitter Blue service to connect their Twitter accounts to their cryptocurrency wallets where their non-fungible token (NFT) holdings were held. Twitter then went on to facilitate the buying and selling of NFTs through tweets. Musk knew that the only way out for Twitter was to open up new steady revenue streams. Were cryptocurrencies and NFTs the answer? Only time would tell.

In this series of case studies, students learn to identify, assess, and control the risks of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in a real-world situation. PopVote was the electronic voting system used by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong. This case consists of cases A, B, and C. Case A gives the background on POP and PopVote. It describes the development history of PopVote, including past voting events, past cyber-attacks, and the evolution of its IT security infrastructure. Students are asked how to identify and assess potential security risks and how to prepare PopVote for an upcoming high-visibility voting event.

In this series of case studies, students learn to identify, assess, and control the risks of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in a real-world situation. PopVote was the electronic voting system used by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong. This case study consists of cases A, B, and C. Case B sets the scene for risk control in information security management. To improve cloud-based security, POP outsourced the system security to Amazon Web Services (AWS), CloudFlare, and UDomain. During the mock and preregistration period of the voting event, the scale of DDoS attacks forced AWS and UDomain to make an unusual move and withdraw their services. CloudFlare also warned that it might suspend its service if there was another wave of cyber-attacks. The POP team had to decide immediately what they should do to control the risks.

In this series of case studies, students learn to identify, assess, and control the risks of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in a real-world situation. PopVote was the electronic voting system used by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong. This case study consists of cases A, B, and C. Case C describes what actually happened to PopVote after AWS and UDomain, security system providers, withdrew their services.