Archives for July 2021

BEIJING (AP) — China’s industry ministry has announced a 6-month campaign to clean up what it says are serious problems with internet apps violating consumer rights, cyber security and “disturbing market order.”

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in an online notice that, among other things, companies must fix pop-ups on apps that deceive and mislead users or force them to use services they might not want.

The order is part of a wider effort to crack down on tech industries and police use of personal information. Authorities have ordered fines and other penalties for some of China’s biggest tech companies.

This latest campaign was launched with a teleconference call Friday, the ministry said. On Sunday, it issued its 15th list of dozens of apps it has said require fixing.

Among 22 specific scenarios it said required “rectification,” the ministry cited pop-up windows as a specific problem, especially situations where the entire screen of a pop-up window is a jump link with a false close button.

Other problems it pointed to were malicious blocking of website links and interference with other companies’ products or services; threats to data security, due to a failure to encrypt sensitive information while it is being transmitted, and failure to obtain users’ consent before providing data to other parties.

It also took aim at illicit broadband networks, which it called “black broadband” that failed to conform to website filing procedures or might be subletting or using illegal access to networks.

The regulators have been stepping up enforcement of anti-monopoly, data security, financial and other rules against scores of tech companies that dominate entertainment, retail and other industries.

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LONDON (AP) — Irish singer Ronan Keating on Monday accepted “substantial damages” from a British tabloid newspaper publisher over phone hacking.

The former member of boy band Boyzone is the latest in a long list of celebrities whose mobile phone voicemail messages were intercepted by News of the World reporters more than a decade ago.

Keating’s lawyer, Ellen Gallagher, told a High Court hearing that the singer had identified a number of “suspicious” articles published between 1996 and 2011 which he said contained his private information.

Keating’s suspicions about who might be leaking personal information to the newspaper “generated distrust which impacted on his relationships and caused him considerable distress and upset,” Gallagher said.

Ben Silverstone, lawyer for News of the World publisher News Group Newspapers, said the company offered “its sincere apologies to the claimant for the distress caused to him by the invasion of his privacy by individuals working for or on behalf of the News of the World.”

“The defendant acknowledges that such activity should never have taken place and that it had no right to intrude into the private life of the claimant in this way,” he said.

The amount of the damages was not disclosed.

Owner Rupert Murdoch shut down the 168-year-old News of the World in 2011 after the revelation that its employees had eavesdropped on celebrities, politicians and crime victims. Since then, police investigations, criminal trials and a public inquiry have revealed that phone hacking was widespread at Britain’s tabloids.

News Group Newspapers and rival publisher Trinity Mirror have both paid millions of pounds to settle lawsuits from hacking victims.

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DALLAS (AP) — It was the start of a steamy Friday two Augusts ago when Jason Whisler settled in for a working breakfast at the Coffee Ranch restaurant in the Texas Panhandle city of Borger. The most pressing agenda item for city officials that morning: planning for a country music concert and anniversary event.

Then Whisler’s phone rang. Borger’s computer system had been hacked.

Workers were frozen out of files. Printers spewed out demands for money. Over the next several days, residents couldn’t pay water bills, the government couldn’t process payroll, police officers couldn’t retrieve certain records. Across Texas, similar scenes played out in nearly two dozen communities hit by a cyberattack officials ultimately tied to a Russia-based criminal syndicate.

In 2019, ransomware had yet to emerge as one of the top national security concerns confronting the United States, an issue that would become the focus of a presidential summit between Washington and Moscow this year. But the attacks in Texas were a harbinger of the now-exploding threat and offer a vivid case study in what happens behind the scenes when small-town America comes under attack.

Texas communities struggled for days with disruptions to core government services as workers in small cities and towns endured a cascade of frustrations brought on by the sophisticated cyberattack, according to thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with people involved in the response. The AP also learned new details about the attack’s scope and victims, including an Air Force base where access to a law enforcement database was interrupted, and a city forced to operate its water-supply system manually.

In recent months, a ransomware attack led to gasoline shortages. Another, tied to the same hacking gang that attacked the Texas communities, threatened meat supplies. But the Texas attacks — which, unlike these prominent cases, were resolved without a ransom payment — make clear that ransomware need not hit vital infrastructure or major corporations to interrupt daily life.

“It was just a scary feeling,” Whisler, Borger’s emergency management coordinator, recounted in an interview.

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In the early morning of Aug. 16, as most Texans were still asleep, hackers half a world away were burrowing into networks. They encrypted files and left ransom notes.

That afternoon, with the attack’s impact becoming apparent, the city manager of Vernon emailed colleagues about a “ransom type” virus affecting the police department. The city near the Oklahoma state line could get back online by paying the $2.5 million the hackers were demanding, he wrote, but that was “obviously” not the plan.

“Holy moly!!!!!” replied city commissioner Pam Gosline, now the mayor.

The culprits were affiliated with REvil, the Russia-linked syndicate that last spring extorted $11 million from meat-processor JBS and more recently was behind a Fourth of July weekend attack that crippled businesses around the globe. In the Texas case, however, communities were ultimately able to recover most of their data and rebuild their systems without anyone paying ransom.

The hackers gained their foothold through an attack on a Texas firm that provides technology services to local governments, branching through screen-sharing software and remote administration to seize control of the networks of some of the company’s clients.

An early hint of trouble came with a 2 a.m. phone call to the firm’s president, Richard Myers. His company, TSM Consulting Services Inc., provides data communications service for Texas communities, linking police agencies to a statewide law enforcement database.

One of his client’s servers was unresponsive, he was told. Upon inspection, Myers noticed that someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the computer system was trying to install something remotely. He rebooted the server. Things initially seemed fixed until the department called back: One of its laptops had a ransom note on it.

It soon became clear the problem wasn’t isolated to a single client.

“I don’t think you can begin to express the terror that goes through your mind when something like that starts to unfold,” he said.

Within hours, state officials were hunkered inside an underground operations center normally used for calamities like hurricanes and floods. Gov. Greg Abbott declared it a cyber disaster. Texas National Guard cyber specialists were activated.

“If you needed to build something — you needed an inspection, something like that — out of luck for a week,” said Andy Bennett, the state’s then-deputy chief information security officer. “Records look-ups? Couldn’t go look up records. Basically, if there’s a municipal function that you would go down to a city hall for, or that you would rely on the police department for, it wasn’t available.”

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In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.

Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.

Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.

One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.

Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.

As they worked to resolve the problem, officials shared draft press releases that offered reassurances that critical emergency operations would continue and that the attacks weren’t a reflection of any misstep by the city.

One councilmember, a military veteran named Milton Ooley, cautioned against publicity for the hackers’ “form of terrorism.”

“This is consistent with my firsthand experience with how the U.S. handled terrorism in Europe when I was there in the late ’70s, some of which was directed at U.S. units including missile units I worked with/in during those days,” he wrote colleagues. In an interview, he said he believed the public was entitled to information but hackers didn’t deserve notoriety.

The day of the attack, Jeremy Sereno was working his civilian job at Dell when he was contacted by the state about the attack. A lieutenant colonel and senior cybersecurity officer with the Texas Military Department, Sereno began helping deploy Texas National Guard troops to hacked cities, where specialists over the next two weeks helped assess the damage, restore data from backed-up files and retake control of locked systems.

One of the first areas of concern was a small North Texas city where the attack locked the “human-machine interface” that workers used to control the water supply, forcing them to operate the system manually, Sereno said. Water purity was not endangered.

“That was probably our biggest number one,” Sereno said. “That’s what’s considered critical infrastructure, when you talk about water.”

AP is not identifying the city at the urging of state officials, who said doing so could draw new attacks on its water system.

In Graham, a small city a couple of hours west of Dallas, the computer virus attacked a police server housing body-camera videos, causing hundreds of them to be lost, said Sgt. Chris Denney.

For days, officers had to use notebooks and pens to take reports. Instead of using mobile data terminals to run checks on people, officers had to rely on requests to dispatchers of a sheriff’s office that was unaffected by the attack, said Chief Brent Bullock.

“That’s been at these officers’ fingertips for years, and then all of a sudden, they don’t have that anymore,” Bullock said. Officers, he added, “kind of had to go back to old school.”

Other communities preemptively took potentially vulnerable systems offline. In the Austin suburb of Leander, the city shut off the program that police used to check license plates for 24 hours as IT staff worked to confirm that it hadn’t been exposed.

Emails reveal moments of exasperation as problems persisted.

Spradling complained to an outside technology company about “massive delays” in getting a response to a support request. Local technology managers griped about what they perceived as state and law enforcement secretiveness. Several in cities that were not hit complained in emails after the attack that they hadn’t been told what company the ransomware spread from and didn’t have enough information to ensure their systems were safe.

The impact wasn’t limited to local governments. Sheppard Air Force Base confirmed to AP that its access to a statewide law enforcement database used for background checks on visitors was temporarily interrupted, causing delays for issuing passes. Operations were otherwise unaffected.

Officials at Joint Base San Antonio Randolph, which public records indicated was also affected, did not directly answer questions about the hack but said that it had no impact on “missions or network security” and the base “as a whole” was not a target.

One complication: TSM’s customer list was itself encrypted, though eventually a copy was procured, officials said. State officials didn’t immediately know which communities had been victimized. They called around asking, “Were you impacted? Were you impacted? Were you impacted?” said Nancy Rainosek, Texas’ chief information security officer.

“There was one place that we contacted and they said, ‘no, no, we’re not hit,’” Rainosek said. Then, days later, “they said, ‘yes, we were.’”

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State officials spent a full week inside their command post — built to withstand a nuclear blast — and used a map to chart the attack’s spread. All told, some 23 government entities were ultimately shaded to indicate they’d been hit.

“It’s a bit of a mind struggle because you’re trying to stay focused and present on the folks that you know about,” said Amanda Crawford, executive director of the Texas Information Resources Department. “But you’re continually worrying about, ‘Is there something you’re missing? Or are there others, that you’re going to get another call that somebody else has been hit?’”

By Wednesday evening, records show, most city services in Borger were restored, including utility payments, vital statistics and most employee computers. The situation had stabilized; the city ended up with about 80% of its data back and the concert Whisler was planning happened as scheduled.

Still, in a city with a roughly $31 million budget, Borger had overtime IT expenses to contend with and purchased $44,000 worth of new computers. It’s invested in additional cybersecurity protections, including some $30,000 in annual costs for additional remote backup.

Borger officials in the weeks before the hack had discussed upgrading the threat level from cyberattacks. Those considerations are now more than theoretical.

“When you complain about having to change your passwords, you complain a lot more when it’s never happened to you and you don’t have anything to relate it to,” Spradling said. “You tend to complain a little less after you’ve had to answer the phone and tell 300 people they couldn’t pay their water bill.”

But damage remains two years later.

Sometimes even now, Spradling said, officials will go to pull an old report or address record — only to find it isn’t there.

___

Tucker reported from Washington.

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Rana el Kaliouby co-founded and led Boston startup Affectiva, which uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to analyze mood and emotion.

Now she’s got a new job as deputy CEO of Smart Eye, after the Swedish eye-tracking company bought Affectiva for $73.5 million in June.

The auto industry is the prime market for Kaliouby and competitors like Australia-based Seeing Machines. Carmakers are bracing for new safety rules and standards around the world that could require dashboard cameras to detect dangerous driver behavior, especially in vehicles that are partly driving themselves but still need human attention.

El Kaliouby says that’s just the beginning of where in-car AI systems are going. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Ten years from now, a family’s in a car. What might your technology be doing on their trip?

A: OK, family’s in the car. You’ve got two kids in the back seat. First of all, the kids are fighting. The car knows that and can see that mom, who’s driving, is getting frustrated, a little mad, distracted. The car intervenes by recommending content for the kids — or through a conversational interface, mediating a game between the kids. They play for a little. They fall asleep. The car can see that so the lights dim and the music or movie turns off. Then the car realizes mom is exhausted and also starting to doze off, so it gets into this chatty mode to reengage her. And then mom leaves the car, forgets the child is in there, and gets a text message that says, “Oh, you may have forgotten Little Baby Joe!’ I’m making this up on the fly. It can basically personalize the whole cabin experience — music, lighting, temperature, based on knowing who’s inside the car and what they’re doing.

Q: What is Affectiva bringing to Smart Eye, and vice versa?

A: Smart Eye is a 22-year-old company. What they’ve been focused on the past couple years — and they are the undisputed market leader — is driver monitoring. They’re able to very accurately determine where a person is looking and they also monitor eye behavior. They can identify when a driver is distracted or drowsy. They’ve been contracted by 13 global automakers. Affectiva spun out of MIT 12 years ago and our focus is humanizing technology by bringing emotional intelligence to machines. We project there’s going to be an evolution in driver monitoring to everything that’s happening inside the vehicle. What are their mood and emotions? What activities are they engaged with? You become the eyes and ears of the car.

Q: How do you detect someone’s mood or emotions?

A: We do a lot of facial analysis but we’ve expanded to do a lot of body “keypoint” tracking so we can detect what people are actually doing — are you slouched in the car? Are you agitated? We monitor all of that.

Q: What about someone’s face will tell you they’re panicked?

A. There are expressions of fear. You can also start tracking other vital signs, like your heart rate or heart rate variability, breathing rate, via an optical sensor. That’s a direction we’re headed. It’s not at all ready for prime time but it’s something Affectiva and Smart Eye are exploring. And once you know a person’s baseline, you can find out if they are deviating from that baseline and the car can flag that.

Q: How do you protect against concerns you can misread someone’s emotion or mood based on race, gender, neurodiversity?

A: This is one of the things Affectiva’s really bringing to the table. It’s something we’ve been super intentional about. It starts with the diversity of the data. If you’re training an algorithm using middle-aged white men, that’s what it’s going to learn. The training set is critical and it’s everything from racial and ethnic diversity to diversity of facial appearances — maybe people are wearing glasses or hijabs or have beards. We’re partnering with synthetic data companies to augment our data sets and fill in the gaps. The second thing is, how do you validate the accuracy of the algorithms? If you just look at high-level accuracy, it might be hiding biases that exist in specific subpopulations. We dissect the data to make sure no bias is creeping in. And finally, the diversity of the team is how you overcome these blind spots.

Q: What about the privacy of people who don’t want to be analyzed or watched in the car?

A: In automotive, the good news is none of the data gets recorded. You do all the processing on the fly and make an inference, say, if the driver is drowsy. The car will hopefully respond to keep the driver safe. I think there needs to be a lot of consumer communication and transparency about what exactly the sensor is doing. I imagine there will be scenarios where you can switch it off. But if it’s a safety consideration, like your semi-autonomous vehicle needs to know if you are paying attention so it can transfer control back and forth, I imagine you may not be allowed to turn it off.

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