Archives for March 2021

MONSTER, Netherlands (AP) — Dutch cress grower Rob Baan has enlisted high-tech helpers to tackle a pest in his greenhouses: palm-sized drones seek and destroy moths that produce caterpillars that can chew up his crops.

“I have unique products where you don’t get certification to spray chemicals and I don’t want it,” Baan said in an interview in a greenhouse bathed in the pink glow of LED lights that help his seedlings grow. His company, Koppert Cress, exports aromatic seedlings, plants and flowers to top-end restaurants around the world.

A keen adopter of innovative technology in his greenhouses, Baan turned to PATS Indoor Drone Solutions, a startup that is developing autonomous drone systems as greenhouse sentinels, to add another layer of protection for his plants.

The drones themselves are basic, but they are steered by smart technology aided by special cameras that scan the airspace in greenhouses.

The drones instantly kill the moths by flying into them, destroying them in midair.

“So it sees the moth flying by, it knows where the drone is … and then it just directs the drone towards the moth,” said PATS chief technical officer Kevin van Hecke.

There weren’t any moths around on a recent greenhouse visit by The Associated Press, but the company has released video shot in a controlled environment that shows how one bug is instantly pulverized by a drone rotor.

The drones form part of an array of pest control systems in Baan’s greenhouses that also includes other bugs, pheromone traps and bumblebees.

The drone system is the brainchild of former students from the Technical University in Delft who thought up the idea after wondering if they might be able to use drones to kill mosquitos buzzing around their rooms at night.

Baan says the drone control system is smart enough to distinguish between good and bad critters.

“You don’t want to kill a ladybug, because a ladybug is very helpful against aphids,” he said. “So they should kill the bad ones, not the good ones. And the good ones are sometimes very expensive — I pay at least 50 cents for one bumblebee, so I don’t want them to kill my bumblebees.”

The young company is still working to perfect the technology.

“It’s still a development product, but we … have very good results. We are targeting moths and we are taking out moths every night in an autonomous way without human intervention,” said PATS CEO Bram Tijmons. “I think that’s a good step forward.”

Baan also acknowledges that the system still needs refining.

“I think they still need too many drones … but it will be manageable, it will be less,” he said. “I think they can do this greenhouse in the future maybe with 50 small drones, and then it’s very beneficial.”

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ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — A gambling industry group wants to teach consumers how to tell if a particular sports betting or online casino site is legal or not.

Conscious Gaming, a nonprofit group associated with an online gambling technology firm, launched its Bettor Safe campaign this week to promote the advantages of licensed gambling sites, including consumer practices, and highlight the risks of unlicensed ones, including identify theft, or the outright theft of deposits.

It also began state-specific campaigns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where research shows many customers are confused about what is a legal gambling site. Additional state-specific efforts are planned soon.

“This campaign comes at a pivotal moment when American sports fans are gearing up for the NCAA basketball tournament amid a pandemic that continues to push individuals online,” said Seth Palansky, a vice president with the group and a former online gambling executive with Caesars Entertainment. “Now more than ever we must educate consumers and equip them with the tools to make more informed decisions about online betting.”

Nationwide, 35% of individuals are unaware whether online betting is legal in their states, and many more, deceived by illegal operators, are wagering on unregulated sites, according to the American Gaming Association national trade group.

A recent survey by Conscious Gaming polled more than 500 adults in New Jersey and Pennsylvania on their habits and attitudes toward online betting. It found more than 25% of respondents in New Jersey and more than 30% of respondents in Pennsylvania were unaware if online betting is legal in their state, or responded that it was not legal.

Kevin O’Toole, executive director of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, called the campaign “an important resource to empower consumers.”

The survey also found about 75% of New Jersey and Pennsylvania respondents could not differentiate a legal betting site from an illegal website.

The campaign’s New Jersey website, for example, offers a list of all the legal sports betting web sites approved by the state Division of Gaming Enforcement.

It also offers a list of things people should look for to help determine whether a particular site is legal or not, including two New Jersey-centric logos for responsible gambling and for the gaming enforcement division.

It asks customers whether a significant amount of information is being sought during registration, saying unlicensed sites typically don’t ask for as much as legal sites do.

And cryptocurrency is not legal for online gambling in New Jersey; any site that accepts it is automatically an illegal site, according to the campaign.

Conscious Gaming is an independent group created by GeoComply, whose technology is widely used in the online gambling industry to verify the physical location of a gambler to comply with state laws.

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Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC.

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BOSTON (AP) — The SolarWinds hacking campaign blamed on Russian spies and the “grave threat” it poses to U.S. national security are widely known. A very different — and no less alarming — coordinated series of intrusions also detected in December has gotten considerably less public attention.

Nimble, highly skilled criminal hackers believed to operate out of Eastern Europe hacked dozens of companies and government agencies on at least four continents by breaking into a single product they all used.

The victims include New Zealand’s central bank, Harvard Business School, Australia’s securities regulator, the high-powered U.S. law firm Jones Day — whose clients include former President Donald Trump — the rail freight company CSX and the Kroger supermarket and pharmacy chain. Also hit was Washington state’s auditor’s office, where the personal data of up to 1.3 million people gathered for an investigation into unemployment fraud was potentially exposed.

The two-stage mega-hack in December and January of a popular file-transfer program from the Silicon Valley company Accellion highlights a threat that security experts fear may be getting out of hand: intrusions by top-flight criminal and state-backed hackers into software supply chains and third-party services.

Operating system companies such as Microsoft have long been bull’s-eyes — with untold thousands of installations of its Exchange email server being violated globally in the past few weeks, mostly after the company issued a patch and disclosed that Chinese state hackers had penetrated the program.

The Accellion casualties have kept piling up, meanwhile, with many being extorted by the Russian-speaking Clop cybercriminal gang, which threat researchers believe may have bought pilfered data from the hackers. Their threat: Pay up or we leak your sensitive data online, be it proprietary documents from Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier or lawyer-client communications from Jones Day.

The hack of up to 100 Accellion customers, who were easily identified by the hackers with an online scan, puts in painful relief a digital age core mission at which both governments and the private sector have been falling short.

“Attackers are finding it harder and harder to gain access via traditional methods, as vendors like Microsoft and Apple have hardened the security of the operating systems considerably over the last years. So, the attackers find easier ways in. This often means going via the supply chain. And as we’ve seen, it works,” said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of the cybersecurity firm F-Secure.

Members of Congress are already dismayed by the supply-chain hack of the Texas network management software company SolarWinds that allowed suspected Russian state-backed hackers to tiptoe unnoticed — apparently intent solely on intelligence-gathering — for more than half a year through the networks of at least nine government agencies and more than 100 companies and think tanks. Only in December was the SolarWinds hacking campaign discovered, by the cybersecurity firm FireEye.

France suffered a similar hack, blamed by its cybersecurity agency on Russian military operatives, that also gamed the supply chain. They slipped malware into an update of network management software from a firm called Centreon, letting them quietly root around victim networks from 2017 to 2020.

Both those hacks snuck malware into software updates. The Accellion hack was different in one key respect: Its file-transfer program resided on victims’ networks either as a stand-alone appliance or cloud-based app. Its job is to securely move around files too large to be attached to email.

Mike Hamilton, a former Seattle chief information security officer now with CI Security, said the trend of exploiting third-party service providers shows no signs of slowing because it gives criminals the highest return on their investment if they “want to compromise a broad swath of companies or government agencies.”

The Accellion breach’s impact might have been dulled had the company alerted customers more quickly, some complain.

The governor of New Zealand’s central bank, Adrian Orr, says Accellion failed to warn it after first learning in mid-December that the nearly 20-year-old FTA application — using antiquated technology and set for retirement — had been breached.

Despite having a patch available on Dec. 20, Accellion did not notify the bank in time to prevent its appliance from being breached five days later, the bank said.

“If we were notified at the appropriate time, we could have patched the system and avoided the breach,” Orr said in a statement posted on the bank’s website. Among information stolen were files containing personal emails, dates of birth and credit information, the bank said.

Similarly, the Washington state auditor’s office has no record of being informed of the breach until Jan. 12, the same day Accellion announced it publicly, said spokeswoman Kathleen Cooper. Accellion said then that it released a patch to the fewer than 50 customers affected within 72 hours of learning of the breach.

Accellion now tells a different story. It says it alerted all 320 potentially affected customers with multiple emails beginning on Dec. 22 — and followed up with emails and phone calls. Company spokesman Rob Dougherty would not directly address the New Zealand central bank’s and Washington state auditor’s complaints. Accellion says fewer than 25 customers appear to have suffered significant data theft.

A timeline released March 1 by the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which Accellion hired to examine the incident, says the company got first word of the breach on Dec. 16. The Washington state auditor says its hack occurred on Christmas.

The notification timing issue is serious. Washington state has already been hit by a lawsuit, and several have been filed against Accellion seeking class action. Other organizations could also face legal or other consequences.

Last month, Harvard Business School officials emailed affected students to tell them that some Social Security numbers had been compromised as well as other personal information. Another victim, the Singapore-based telecommunications company Singtel, said personal data on about 129,000 customers was compromised.

Too often, software companies with hundreds of programmers have just one or two security people, said Katie Moussouris, CEO of Luta Security.

“We wish we could say that organizations were uniformly investing in security. But we’re actually seeing them just dealing with the breaches and then vowing to do better in the future. And that’s been sort of the business model.”

Dougherty, the Accellion spokesman, said the attacks “had nothing to do with staffing,” but he would not say how many people directly assigned to security the company employed in mid-December.

Cybersecurity threat analysts hope the snowballing of supply-chain hacks stuns the software industry into prioritizing security. Otherwise, vendors risk the fate that has befallen SolarWinds.

In a filing this past week with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company offered a bleak outlook.

It said that as supply-chain hacks “continue to evolve at a rapid pace” it “may be unable to identify current attacks, anticipate future attacks or implement adequate security measures.”

The ultimate, painful upshot, the document added:

“Customers have and may in the future defer purchasing or choose to cancel or not renewal their agreements or subscriptions with us.”

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Associated Press writer Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington, contributed to this report.

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Republican state lawmakers are pushing for social media giants to face costly lawsuits for policing content on their websites, taking aim at a federal law that prevents internet companies from being sued for removing posts.

GOP politicians in roughly two dozen states have introduced bills that would allow for civil lawsuits against platforms for what they call the “censorship” of posts. Many protest the deletion of political and religious statements, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats, who also have called for greater scrutiny of big tech, are sponsoring the same measures in at least two states.

The federal liability shield has long been a target of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans, whose complaints about Silicon Valley stifling conservative viewpoints were amplified when the companies cracked down on misleading posts about the 2020 election.

Twitter and Facebook, which are often criticized for opaque policing policies, took the additional step of silencing Trump on their platforms after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Twitter has banned him, while a semi-independent panel is reviewing Facebook’s indefinite suspension of his account and considering whether to reinstate access.

Experts argue the legislative proposals are doomed to fail while the federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is in place. They said state lawmakers are wading into unconstitutional territory by trying to interfere with the editorial policies of private companies.

Len Niehoff, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, described the idea as a “constitutional non-starter.”

“If an online platform wants to have a policy that it will delete certain kinds of tweets, delete certain kinds of users, forbid certain kinds of content, that is in the exercise of their right as a information distributer,” he said. “And the idea that you would create a cause of action that would allow people to sue when that happens is deeply problematic under the First Amendment.”

The bills vary slightly but many allow for civil lawsuits if a social media user is censored over posts having to do with politics or religion, with some proposals allowing for damages of $75,000 for each blocked post. They would apply to companies with millions of users and carve out exemptions for posts that call for violence, entice criminal acts or other similar conduct.

The sponsor of Oklahoma’s version, Republican state Sen. Rob Standridge, said social media posts are being unjustly censored and that people should have a way to challenge the platforms’ actions given their powerful place in American discourse. His bill passed committee in late February on a 5-3 vote, with Democrats opposed.

“This just gives citizens recourse,” he said, adding that the companies “can’t abuse that immunity” given to them through federal law.

Part of a broad, 1996 federal law on telecoms, Section 230 generally exempts internet companies from being sued over what users post on their sites. The statute, which was meant to promote growth of the internet, exempts websites from being sued for removing content deemed to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable” as long as the companies are acting in “good faith.”

As the power of social media has grown, so has the prospect of government regulation. Several congressional hearings have been held on content moderation, sometimes with Silicon Valley CEOs called to testify. Republicans, and some Democrats, have argued that the companies should lose their liability shield or that Section 230 should be updated to make the companies meet certain criteria before receiving the legal protection.

Twitter and Facebook also have been hounded over what critics have described as sluggish, after-the-fact account suspensions or post takedowns, with liberals complaining they have given too much latitude to conservatives and hate groups.

Trump railed against Section 230 throughout his term in office, well before Twitter and Facebook blocked his access to their platforms after the assault on the Capitol. Last May, he signed a largely symbolic executive order that directed the executive branch to ask independent rule-making agencies whether new regulations could be placed on the companies.

“All of these tech monopolies are going to abuse their power and interfere in our elections, and it has to be stopped,” he told supporters at the Capitol hours before the riot.

Antigone Davis, global head of safety for Facebook, said these kinds of proposals would make it harder for the site to remove posts involving hate speech, sexualized photos of minors and other harmful content.

“We will continue advocating for updated rules for the internet, including reforms to federal law that protect free expression while allowing platforms like ours to remove content that threatens the safety and security of people across the United States,” she said.

In a statement, Twitter said: “We enforce the Twitter rules judiciously and impartially for everyone on our service – regardless of ideology or political affiliation – and our policies help us to protect the diversity and health of the public conversation.”

Researchers have not found widespread evidence that social media companies are biased against conservative news, posts or materials.

In a February report, New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights called the accusations political disinformation spread by Republicans. The report recommended that social media sites give clear reasoning when they take action against material on their platforms.

“Greater transparency — such as that which Twitter and Facebook offered when they took action against President Trump in January — would help to defuse claims of political bias, while clarifying the boundaries of acceptable user conduct,” the report read.

While the federal law is in place, the state proposals mostly amount to political posturing, said Darrell West, vice president of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a public policy group.

“This is red meat for the base. It’s a way to show conservatives they don’t like being pushed around,” he said. “They’ve seen Trump get kicked off Facebook and Twitter, and so this is a way to tell Republican voters this is unfair and Republicans are fighting for them.”

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Izaguirre reported from Lindenhurst, New York

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Associated Press coverage of voting rights receives support in part from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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