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Mississippi officials block COVID vaccine misinformation

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The Mississippi State Department of Health is now blocking comments on its Facebook posts that relate to COVID-19 because of a “rise of misinformation” about the virus and vaccinations, a health official said.

“The comments section of our Facebook page has increasingly come to be dominated by misinformation about COVID-19,” state health department spokesperson Liz Sharlot said in a statement.

Sharlot said allowing the comments that “mislead the public about the safety, importance and effectiveness of vaccination” is “directly contrary” to the state’s public health mission, which includes encouraging members of the public to be vaccinated against the virus, which has been recently making a resurgence in the state.

Only about 31% of Mississippians have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, a statistic that ranks near the bottom of U.S. states.

The Department of Health posts multiple times each day on its Facebook page about COVID-19. Posts include information on numbers of new coronavirus cases in the state, details on pop-up vaccination clinics and transportation services to vaccination clinics for homebound residents.

Sharlot said the comments will be back when the department has “the resources to effectively curb misleading, harmful and off-topic commentary that disserves the public.” Federal regulators have said the vaccines are safe and offer strong protection against contracting the potentially life-threatening disease.

Mississippi health officials announced on Friday that they are recommending that people 65 and older and those with chronic underlying medical conditions refrain from attending indoor mass social gatherings in the coming weeks because of a rising number of coronavirus cases in the state.

State officials have also advised in the last week that vulnerable people should avoid indoor mass gatherings whether or not they are vaccinated, through at least July 26, and that people who are not vaccinated should wear a mask when in public settings.

State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs cited a sharp increase in cases of the highly contagious delta variant, which is now the predominant strain of COVID-19 in the state.

Dobbs tweeted Tuesday that 12 children were in an intensive care unit with the delta variant, with 10 on ventilators.

“Delta Surge — be careful,” he wrote.

On June 21, 91 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Mississippi. On Sunday, that number had risen to 228 people, according to health officials.

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Leah Willingham is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Russia-based ransomware gang offline but cause not clear

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Russia-based criminal syndicate behind a devastating series of recent ransomware attacks was offline on Tuesday, but cybersecurity experts said that it was premature to speculate why and that there was no indication of a law enforcement takedown.

REvil’s dark web data-leak site and ransom-negotiating portals were both unreachable, cybersecurity researchers said. The group was responsible for the Memorial Day ransomware attack on the meat processor JBS and the supply-chain attack this month targeting the software company Kaseya that crippled well over 1,000 businesses globally.

President Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin on a call Friday that he needed to rein in attacks from Russia-based groups and warned that the U.S. had the right to defend its people and critical infrastructure from attacks.

But there were no immediate or public signs that the government had anything to do with REvil appearing offline. It was also possible that the group was laying low after the attack, or switching methods “as we did expose them,” said threat researcher Ryan Sherstobitoff of SecurityScorecard.

“It could be that the server hardware failed, or that it was intentionally taken down, or that someone attacked their host,” said Sean Gallagher, a threat researcher at the cybersecurity firm Sophos. He noted that REvil’s public ransom-negotiating site was also down last week.

Spokespeople for the White House and U.S. CyberCommand, the Pentagon’s cyber arm, declined to comment on Tuesday.

“We have seen no indicators for either voluntary shutdown nor of any offensive steps from law enforcement,” said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security. “Right now, perhaps, it is too early to speculate, especially as REvil was building up their strength over the recent months.”

“There is always a glimmer of hope that Russia is finally doing something right,” he added.

Ransomware variants have previously disappeared as the criminals behind them retooled and modified their malware before introducing it under a new guise. That’s what threat analysts believe happened with a precursor to the REvil ransomware-as-a-service software called Gandcrab. It was the most successful variant over a 15-month run that began in January 2018.

Fraud or innovation? Views clash in trial of Georgia’s Beck

ATLANTA (AP) — Prosecutors want jurors to conclude that suspended Georgia Insurance Commissioner Jim Beck was running a $2 million scam to bilk money from the property insurer he led before being elected. Defense attorneys say Beck was actually an innovative executive who led the Georgia Underwriting Association to strong profits and that prosecutors don’t understand Beck’s innovations.

That’s how lawyers on Tuesday kicked off what’s expected to be a two-week trial for Beck in federal court in Atlanta. The Republican was elected insurance and safety fire commissioner in 2018 and then indicted in May 2019, months after taking office. Beck is charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering.

Before he was elected, Beck was general manager of the Georgia Underwriting Association, an insurer of last resort that covers property owners unable to buy insurance on the regular market. Those regular insurers are co-owners of the GUA, sharing risk of any losses.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sekret Sneed told jurors in her opening argument that Beck, a cousin and some friends created a series of shell companies that billed GUA for bogus services, with Beck ensuring invoices got paid even though some employees say they never saw any work product. Then the intermediaries sent money back to Creative Consultants or the Georgia Christian Coalition, both of which Beck controlled.

“What is Creative Consultants?” Sneed said. “It’s just a bank account controlled by the Becks.”

Sneed said investigators have concluded that business expenses Beck claimed also were faked.

“You will hear from the IRS that it is impossible that the defendant could have clamed the business expenses he did,” Sneed said.

Instead prosecutors allege Beck spent the money on himself, on investments, on taxes and his insurance commissioner campaign.

“Even the defendant had to keep a flowchart to keep it straight,” Sneed said.

But defense attorneys questioned how Beck could have been stealing from GUA when he turned it from losses to profits, saying he turned around a money-losing outfit, cutting losses by improving the process of underwriting insurance and cutting expenses by lowering the amount GUA paid others for reinsurance. That’s a way of getting other insurers to shoulder some risks.

“The truth is, he modernized the company with innovative business solutions,” defense lawyer Randy Chartash told jurors. “He saved them money; he made them money.”

Chartash said prosecutors must prove Beck intended to harm GUA, not just that some of his methods might have been underhanded.

“Intent to deceive alone, without the intent to cause loss or injury, is not enough,” Chartash said. “Jim Beck made them a profit, a profit they had not made in 40 years. That is not causing a loss or injury, or intended to cause a loss or injury.”

Chartash also said the defense will show the work product of at least some of the contractors named in the scheme, disputing prosecutors’ contention that the outside companies did nothing.

“The evidence shows they did provide work,” Chartash said. “We believe that, in and of itself, will be sufficient to mandate an acquittal.”

The first witness in the case was longtime GUA employee Judy Strickland, who was fired by Beck because he said she made inappropriate remarks to another employee.

Strickland’s testimony focused on invoices from Green Technology Services, a company that said it provided home inspections and data to help GUA judge the risks of various properties. Green Technology Services was owned by Matthew Barfield, a cousin of Beck.

Strickland testified Green Tech’s invoices were unusual because they contained little detail about what the company was providing and that Beck always handed them to her to pay, instead of bills arriving in the mail.

She also said checks were always left for Green Tech at GUA’s front desk to be physically picked up, instead of being mailed to the company’s post office box in Villa Rica.

Defense lawyer Bill Thomas questioned whether Strickland disliked Beck and the changes he made to GUA’s business. Strickland said Beck’s methods were different, but that “I did not have a problem with it.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican, called on Beck to resign a day after his indictment. Beck voluntarily suspended himself from office but said he was innocent and not resigning. Beck has continued to collect a state salary of about $200,000 even as the state has also been paying John King, appointed by Kemp to serve as commissioner, King is running in 2022 to keep the job.

Beck is also accused of using more than $4,000 from the Georgia Arson Control Program to pay for 1,500 campaign signs when he was running for insurance commissioner.

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Follow Jeff Amy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jeffamy.

Activists sue federal agency over voting system guidelines

Key elements of the first federal technology standards for voting equipment in 15 years should be scrapped because language that would have banned the devices from connecting to the internet was dropped after private meetings held with manufacturers, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit against the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., claims those meetings should have been open and that changes to the draft standards should have been shared with the commission’s advisory and standards boards. The lawsuit seeks to have those changes set aside.

The standards, approved in February, did not include draft language that would have banned wireless technology from voting equipment under federal certification guidelines. Voting security experts say the machines will be vulnerable to hacking without such a ban.

While the commission’s certification guidelines are voluntary, multiple states use them to set mandatory requirements for voting equipment.

Federal law requires the agency to develop its guidelines for voting systems in public, said Susan Greenhalgh of the nonprofit Free Speech for People, the group that brought the lawsuit along with University of California, Berkeley computer scientist Philip Stark, who sits on the commission’s advisory board.

Greenhalgh said that was not done ahead of the February vote by commissioners to ratify what had been draft standards.

“Instead, the EAC brazenly flouted its legal obligation to adhere to a transparent process, choosing instead to invite the manufacturers into private meetings so they could alter the voting system standards to ease requirements and benefit the manufacturers,” she said.

Agency leaders have defended the standards, saying the features that allow voting machines to connect to the internet must be disabled under the new rules. They also said previously that a ban on having wireless hardware in voting machines would force vendors to use more expensive, custom-built hardware, a step that could hurt competition in the industry.

An email to an agency official seeking a response to the lawsuit was not immediately returned.

Liz Weston: Who gets the keys to your digital estate?

You may not own cryptocurrency or nonfungible tokens. You may not have a big Instagram following or run an online business. But if you do almost anything online, you probably have digital assets — electronic records that you own, control or license. Failing to make arrangements for those assets while you’re alive could cause unnecessary costs, stress and heartache to those you leave behind.

Online photo and video collections could be lost forever. Heirs could also be locked out of electronic records with monetary value, such as cryptocurrency and frequent flyer miles. Email and social media accounts could be hacked. Even basic tasks, such as paying bills online or canceling online subscriptions, may be difficult or impossible if you haven’t made arrangements.

“There would be no way for someone to know how I pay bills unless they could access my online account and my emails,” says Abby Schneiderman , co-founder of Everplans , a site for creating end-of-life plans and storing documents. “And if it takes you a while to access these accounts, you’re going to realize afterwards, ‘Well, we’ve lost thousands of dollars on services we don’t use or don’t need anymore, because we can’t access them.’”

Here’s what you should consider and do to make this job easier for the person who winds up doing it.

THE ONLINE LIFE DOESN’T LEAVE A PAPER TRAIL

In the past, your executor — the person entrusted with settling your estate after your death — probably could have figured out what you owned and owed by rummaging through the papers in your filing cabinet and the bills in your mail, notes Sharon Hartun g, the author of two books for financial advisors, “Your Digital Undertaker” and “Digital Executor.” That’s no longer the case.

“Because our digital assets tend to be virtual in nature, an executor is not going to find them in a search of our home office,” Hartung says. “We’re going to have to leave some additional instructions on what we’ve created and how the executor is supposed to get access.”

Google and Facebook are among the few online providers that allow you to appoint someone to manage your accounts if you become incapacitated or die. Apple recently announced plans to add a similar feature. The vast majority of online providers don’t have this option, however. Complicating matters further, almost all providers prohibit sharing passwords, Hartung says.

Typically, executors can’t demand access to your digital assets unless you specifically give them authority to do so in your will or living trust. Even then, a provider’s terms of service may limit what the executor can do and hinder them from carrying out your wishes.

So giving your executor your login credentials may be the easiest way to make sure they can carry out your wishes, estate planning experts say.

MAKE A DIGITAL ASSETS INVENTORY

The first step in creating a plan for your digital assets is to make a list of them. Searching for a “digital assets inventory” will turn up some worksheets, including a detailed one created by the trade organization Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners , or STEP, that allows you to list your accounts, usernames and, if desired, your passwords.

Don’t forget to include access to your devices. If you have two-factor authentication set up on accounts to verify your identity — and typically you should — your executor will need the passcode to unlock your phone or other device that receives the authentication code.

You may also want to leave a letter of instruction telling your executor about your wishes for various assets — what to delete, what to archive and what to transfer to heirs, for example.

Another option is to keep your login credentials in a password manager such as LastPass or 1Password . These tools typically have a “notes” field that would allow you to include details about how you’d like the account to be handled. You would need to provide your executor with the master password, which could be included in the letter of instruction.

KEEP YOUR INVENTORY SAFE — AND UPDATED

You don’t want to include sensitive information such as passwords in your will, since that document becomes public after you die. Instead, store the inventory and letter of instruction with your other estate planning documents in a secure location , such as with your attorney or in a home safe, and let your executor know where to find it. You also could upload the information to an online storage site, such as Everplans or LifeSite, that allows you to give a trusted person access to the documents.

Consider reviewing the inventory at least once a year and make any needed updates. You’ll rest easier knowing your loved ones won’t be locked out of your digital life.

“Creating a roadmap is really important so that there are no surprises, no tears, that there’s as little stress as possible,” Schneiderman says.

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This column was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Liz Weston is a columnist at NerdWallet, a certified financial planner and author of “Your Credit Score.” Email: lweston@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @lizweston.

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