Archives for May 2021

NEW YORK (AP) — Board members at Microsoft Corp. made a decision in 2020 that it wasn’t appropriate for its co-founder Bill Gates to continue sitting on its board as they investigated the billionaire’s prior romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee that was deemed inappropriate, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Citing unnamed sources, The Journal reported online Sunday that board members looking into the matter hired a law firm in late 2019 to conduct an investigation after a Microsoft engineer alleged in a letter that she had a sexual relationship with Gates over several years.

The Journal reported that Gates resigned before the board’s investigation was finished, citing another person familiar with the matter.

An unnamed spokeswoman for Gates acknowledged to The Journal that there was an affair almost 20 years ago, and that it ended “amicably.” The spokesperson told The Journal that “his decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter.””

When he left Microsoft’s board last year, Gates said he was stepping down to focus on philanthropy.

In an email sent to The Associated Press late Sunday, Microsoft said that it “received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000. A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm, to conduct a thorough investigation. Throughout the investigation, Microsoft provided extensive support to the employee who raised the concern.”

Earlier this month, Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they were divorcing after 27 years of marriage but would keep working together at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. Gates was formerly the world’s richest person and his fortune is estimated at well over $100 billion.

Earlier Sunday, The New York Times reported that Gates had developed “a reputation for questionable conduct in work-related settings.”

The Times reported that on at least a few occasions, Gates made overtures to women who worked for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Times cited people with direct knowledge of his behavior.

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Sophie Zhang worked as a Facebook data scientist for nearly three years before was she fired in the fall of 2020. On her final day, she posted a 7,800-word memo to the company’s internal forum — such farewell notes, if not the length, are a common practice for departing employees. In the memo, first published by Buzzfeed, she outlined evidence that governments in countries like Azerbaijan and Honduras were using fake accounts to influence the public. Elsewhere, such as India and Ecuador, Zhang found coordinated activity intended to manipulate public opinion, although it wasn’t clear who was behind it. Facebook, she said, didn’t take her findings seriously.

Zhang’s experience led her to a stark conclusion: “I have blood on my hands.”

Facebook has not disputed the facts of Zhang’s story but has sought to diminish the importance of her findings.

“We fundamentally disagree with Ms. Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform,” Facebook said in a statement. “As part of our crackdown against this kind of abuse, we have specialized teams focused on this work and have already taken down more than 150 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Around half of them were domestic networks that operated in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and in the Asia Pacific region.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

QUESTION: Why were you fired from Facebook?

ANSWER: I’ve made the news for much of the work I have done protecting elections. This might sound very important to the average person, but at Facebook I was a very low-level employee. In addition, this work was not my official job. I was conducting it entirely in my spare time, with the knowledge and acquiescence of leadership, of course. At first, the company was supportive of this. But gradually they lost patience with me. I was underperforming.

Q: In your memo, you wrote that you have blood on your hands. Why did you say that?

A: Whether something was acted on was, as far as I could tell, entirely a function of how much I yelled, how much I made noise.

I know that many of the decisions they have made have had impact in the countries that they worked on. The U.S. is still deeply affected by what happened in 2016 with Russian manipulation on Facebook. For many countries like Honduras or Azerbaijan, this is their own Russia. But it’s done not by a foreign power, but by their own government — and without even bothering to hide.

I tried my best to make decisions based on the information I had at the time. But of course I am just one person. Sometimes I waited on something longer than I should have. At this level of responsibility, your best is often not enough.

Q: How did you get into the work you did?

A: When I joined the company I was, like many people, deeply affected by Russia 2016. And I decided to start looking for overlap between inauthentic activity and political targets. And I started finding many results in many places, particularly what we call the global South, in Honduras, Brazil, India.

Honduras got my attention because it had a very large amount (of inauthentic behavior) compared to the others. This was very unsophisticated activity we are talking about. Literal bots. And then I realized that this was essentially a troll farm being run quite openly by an employee of the president of Honduras. And that seemed extraordinarily awful.

Q: Then what did you do?

I talked about it internally. Essentially everyone agreed that it was bad. No one wants to be defending this sort of activity, but people couldn’t agree on whose job it was to deal with it.

I was trying desperately to find anyone who cared. I talked with my manager and their manager. I talked to the threat intelligence team. I talked with many integrity teams. It took almost a year for anything to happen.

Q: You’ve said there is a priority list of countries. What happens to countries that aren’t on that list?

A: It’s not a hard and fast rule. Facebook does takedowns in small countries, too. But most of these takedowns are reactive, by which I mean they come from outside groups — tips from opposition groups, tips from NGOs, reporter investigations, reports from the CIA, etc. What happened in this case was that no one outside the company was complaining.

Q: Given the resources Facebook has, why it can’t prioritize every country?

A: The answer that I’ve seen at Facebook when I was there, when these questions were asked, was that even though Facebook has a ton of money, human resources are different. Even if you have infinite money, you can’t expand its size by a factor of 10 every night. It takes time to train people. It takes time to grow.

And it was willing to believe that for a while when I was there. But I think in retrospect, if they genuinely believed that it was important, they would be taking steps that they aren’t. They would be focusing very highly on retaining talent in the integrity teams. And they would certainly never have fired me.

Q: How do people still at Facebook try to change this?

A: Like most employees, they’re just average people who want to do the 9-to-6, want to go home at the end of the day and sleep.

There’s also a self-selection bias. If you think that Facebook is evil, you aren’t likely to join Facebook.

But there are many people also who joined Facebook because they wanted to make it better. I was very upfront with them when I joined. I don’t think Facebook is making the world a better place. And I told them I wanted to fix it.

Q: Is there a concern among employees about the company’s image?

A: I think employees have gotten more pessimistic over time. But there’s also a very strong insularity and perhaps paranoia toward the mainstream press. People are skeptical of what the press says about the company.

I don’t want to diminish that Facebook has been very open historically. We had regular access to the CEO. I was able to, as a very low level employee, be involved in our discussions with a company vice president. But it’s also been changing over time because of fear and worry about employee leaks.

Q: Who is doing the work you did now?

A: I don’t know. I was the only person who was going out on my own to look for this behavior rather than waiting for people to tell us that something was going on. The reason I found so many things so easily was because there was so much low-hanging fruit.

Q: Facebook says it’s taking down many inauthentic accounts and has sought to dismiss your story.

A: So this is a very typical Facebook response, by which I mean that they are not actually answering the question. Suppose your spouse asks you, “Did you clean up the dishes yesterday?” And you respond by saying, “I always prioritize cleaning the dishes. I make sure to clean the dishes. I do not want there to be dirty dishes.” It’s an answer that may make sense, but it does not actually answer that question.

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SINGAPORE (AP) — Indonesian ride hailing company Gojek and the country’s biggest e-commerce firm Tokopedia said Monday that they are merging to form the GoTo Group, adding to surging competition in Southeast Asia that is attracting billions of dollars from investors.

The companies said the deal was Indonesia’s biggest ever, based on historical fundraising rounds for Gojek, priced in 2019, and Tokopedia, priced in early-2020, that put the combined past valuations of both companies at $18 billion.

The new company will provide services from ride-hailing and financial services to e-commerce. Gojek’s founder Nadiem Makarim is now Indonesia’s minister of education and culture, and the newly combined entity GoTo is backed by investors including Alibaba, BackRock, Tencent and Temasek Holdings.

The merger comes a month after Gojek’s largest rival, Singapore-based Grab Holdings, said it would list in the United States via a merger with a special public acquisition company (SPAC) that valued the company at $40 billion.

Gojek co-CEO Andre Soelistyo will lead the new company, while Tokopedia’s President Patrick Cao will retain his title in the combined entity.

“Today is a truly historic day as we mark the beginning of GoTo and the next phase of growth for Gojek, Tokopedia and GoTo Financial,” Soelistyo said in a statement released Monday.

He said that the company intends to promote financial inclusion while providing “best in class” delivery of goods and services.

The merger of Gojek and Tokopedia comes as competition is heating up in Southeast Asia, where technology companies compete for the wallets of over 650 million people.

GoTo’s rival Grab also provides ride-hailing and on-demand services across eight countries in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, while internet firm Sea Limited has made a massive push into e-commerce in Asia with its Shopee e-commerce platform.

Gojek was founded in 2010 by Makarim as a call center for motorbike taxis, known as “Ojek” in Indonesia. It has since expanded to provide not just ride-hailing but also a variety of on-demand services, including food delivery and online payments.

Makarim stepped down as CEO in October 2019 after joining the Indonesian cabinet, and Soelistyo, together with Kevin Aluwi, were named co-CEOs.

Tokopedia was founded in 2009 by William Tanuwijaya. It has expanded to become Indonesia’s largest e-commerce firm and like its peers has added financial services such as digital payments and lending services.

GoTo Group has over 100 million monthly active users, the companies said, with its business encompassing 2% of Indonesia’s GDP of more than $1 trillion.

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This story has been corrected to show that GoTo Group’s monthly active users is 100 million.

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PARIS (AP) — Cybercriminals have hit four Asian subsidiaries of the Paris-based insurance company AXA with a ransomware attack, impacting operations in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines, the insurer said.

The criminals claimed to have stolen 3 terabytes of data including medical records and communications with doctors and hospitals.

In Ireland, meanwhile, the national healthcare system struggled to restore IT systems that were all but paralyzed in a cyberattack last week by a different Russian-speaking ransomware group. That group is demanding $20 million, according to the ransom negotiation page on its darknet site, which The Associated Press viewed.

The gang threatened Monday to “start publishing and selling your private information very soon.”

The Irish government’s decision not to pay the criminals means hospitals won’t have access to patient records — and must resort mostly to handwritten notes — until painstaking efforts are complete to restore thousands of computer servers from backups.

AXA Partners, the Paris insurer’s international arm, offered few details of the Asia attacks. It said in a brief statement Sunday that their full impact was being investigated and that steps would be “taken to notify and support all corporate clients and individuals impacted.” It said the attack was recent, but did not specify when exactly. It said data in Thailand was accessed and that “regulators and business partners have been informed.”

News of the Asia attack was first reported by the Financial Times. The attackers used a ransomware variant called Avaddon. In a post on their darknet leak site including some document samples, they claim to have stolen 3 terabytes of data including medical records, customer IDs and privileged communications with hospitals and doctors. Avaddon threatened to leak “valuable company documents” in 10 days if the company did not pay an unspecified ransom.

AXA, among Europe’s top five insurers, said this month that it will stop writing cyber-insurance policies in France that reimburse customers for extortion payments made to ransomware criminals.

The insurer said at the time that it was suspending the option in France only in response to growing concern that such reimbursements encourage cyber criminals to demand ransom from companies they prey on, crippling them with malware. Once victims of ransomware pay up, criminals provide software keys to decode the data. Last year, ransomware reached epidemic levels as criminals increasingly turned to “double extortion,” stealing sensitive data before activating the encryption software that paralyzes networks and threatening to dump it online if they don’t get paid.

It appears that’s exactly what happened to the AXA subsidiaries and Ireland’s health care system. In the latter case, the criminals claim to have stolen more than 700 gigabytes of personal data on patients and employees — including home addresses and phone numbers — as well as customer databases, payroll and other financial information. The criminals claimed to have spent two weeks in the network before executing the ransomware.

The top victims of ransomware are in the United States, followed by France, experts say. The extent of damage, and payouts, in Asian countries was not immediately clear. Like most top ransomware purveyors, Avaddon’s ransomware is programmed not to target computers with Russian-language keyboards and enjoys safe harbor in former Soviet states.

The group that attacked Ireland’s Health Service Executive, Conti, similarly enjoys Kremlin tolerance and is among the most prolific such gangs, recently attacking such high-profile targets as the school system in Broward County, Florida, which serves Fort Lauderdale and is among the U.S.’s largest school districts.

Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin has refused to pay ransom despite an attack announced Friday that caused the country of 5 million to shut down and rebuild its public health care system’s IT network.

The system’s chief operations officer, Anne O’Connor, told a local radio reporter on Sunday that many cancer treatment sessions, X-rays and other radiology appointments had been canceled, describing perhaps the worst impact to date on a healthcare system from ransomware.

“There’s not much back up and running,” yet, O’Connor said of the IT network, adding that data on thousands of servers would need to be rebuilt from backups. “It’s going to be a slow process.”

“All of our diagnostic capability in terms of radiology have gone,” she said. “We have no capability now to look back at any previous tests, any previous scans. We can’t order lab tests or radiology electronically.”

She said hospitals had resorted to “handwritten notes. We have people in hospitals delivering pieces of paper around with lab results, et cetera.”

Ransomware attacks returned to headlines this month after hackers struck the United States’ largest fuel pipeline, the Colonial Pipeline, and the company shut it down for days to contain the damage.

The ransomware syndicates that have had the biggest impact are so-called “big-game” hunters like Avaddon and Conti that identify and target lucrative victims. They lease their “ransomware-as-a-service” to affiliates they recruit who do most of the heavy-lifting — taking more risk and a higher share of the profits.

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Bajak reported from Boston.

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