Hackers Drawn to Energy Sector’s Lack of Sensors, Controls
Oil and gas companies, including some of the most celebrated industry names in the Houston area, are facing increasingly sophisticated hackers seeking to steal trade secrets and disrupt operations, according to a newspaper investigation.
A stretch of the Gulf Coast near Houston features one of the largest concentrations of refineries, pipelines and chemical plants in the country, and cybersecurity experts say it’s an alluring target for espionage and other cyberattacks.
“There are actors that are scanning for these vulnerable systems and taking advantage of those weaknesses when they find them,” said Marty Edwards, director of U.S. Homeland Security’s Cyber Emergency Response Team for industrial systems.
Homeland Security, which is responsible for protecting the nation from cybercrime, received reports of some 350 incidents at energy companies from 2011 to 2015, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle has found. Over that period, the agency found nearly 900 security flaws within U.S. energy companies, more than any other industry.
Steps are being taken to thwart attacks. For instance, the Coast Guard in a joint operation with Houston police patrolled the waters southeast of Houston last year conducting sweeps for unprotected wireless signals that hackers could use to gain access to facilities. The operation was one of the first of its kind in the U.S. concentrating on cyberattacks by sea.
But the vast network of oil and gas operations makes it difficult to secure. Thousands of interconnected sensors and controls that run oil and gas facilities remain rife with weak spots.
Many companies the technology and personnel to detect hackers. Equipment was designed decades ago without security features, and efforts over the years to link computer networks to devices that monitor pressure or control valves have exposed operations to online threats.
“You could mess with a refinery or cause a vessel to explode,” Richard Garcia, a former FBI agent who became a cybersecurity specialist, told the Chronicle.
Power, chemical and nuclear facilities must adhere to strict cybersecurity measures, but federal law doesn’t impose such standards on the oil and gas sector. And when oil and gas companies have been infiltrated by a hacker, they’re not required to report the incident.
More than 20 of the nation’s largest oil companies _ including Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips, refiner Phillips 66 and pipeline operator Kinder Morgan _ declined to comment or did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The American Petroleum Institute, the national trade association for oil and gas, also declined to comment.
Charles McConnell, executive director of Rice University’s Energy and Environment Initiative, said oil companies tend to rush to deploy new computer technologies that make operations more productive, but only afterward considering ways to defuse online threats.
“The pace of change of the technology we’ve adopted is every step of the way more and more vulnerable to cyberattack,” McConnell said.
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Could Twitter’s New Abuse Crackdown Lead to Censorship?
Twitter introduced new safety measures this week meant to crack down on online harassment and protect people from viewing offensive material, but some free-speech advocates are concerned the changes could lead to censorship of unpopular ideas.
The social media company announced Wednesday that it would start hiding potentially menacing tweets, even if the tweets or accounts in question hadn’t been reported as abusive.
“We’re working to identify accounts as they’re engaging in abusive behavior, even if this behavior hasn’t been reported to us,” the company said in a statement announcing the changes. “Then, we’re taking action by limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time, such as allowing only their followers to see their Tweets.”
The so-called stealth bans could be placed on accounts, the company’s statement said, if a Twitter user sent unsolicited messages to another user who was not following the sender.
Twitter said it would “act on accounts” only when it was confident abuse had taken place, based on the algorithms it uses to identify illicit posts.
This new automated stealth ban capability became a cause of consternation for Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the free-speech advocacy group PEN America, because she said it could easily become a solution “where there is really no problem that needs to be solved.”
‘Mistaken’ moves?
“To take action when there hasn’t been a complaint raises the concern of whether there will be mistaken blocking of accounts or suspending of accounts,” she said. “That raises a risk.”
Twitter has been under pressure to address abusive speech and trolling on its platform in recent months after celebrities and others complained of sustained, coordinated abuse campaigns.
Actress Leslie Jones notably swore off the social media service for a brief time last year after she was targeted by online trolls and harassed with racism and death threats. The incident led to a personal meeting between Jones and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and several months later the company began introducing new tools to address online abuse.
Twitter expanded its “mute” feature to allow users to block specific words or phrases from showing up in their notifications. It expanded users’ ability to report hateful conduct. And it retrained its support teams on dealing with online abuse.
These types of changes that allow users to have more control over what content they see and whom they interact with are positive steps, Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told VOA.
Control for users
The ACLU encourages companies to focus less on a top-down approach to censorship and more “on tools that allow users to control their experience on the platform,” she said.
“Attempts to put the thumb on the scale on the censorship side are prone to error and prone to human biases,” Bhandari said.
Newer tools introduced by Twitter, though, give the company a far greater role in controlling what content gets seen.
In February, Twitter began pre-emptively hiding what it called “potentially abusive or low-quality tweets” from conversations on the website. The tweets will still be visible to users, but only to “those who seek them out.”
“Our team has also been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward,” Twitter said in a February statement.
VOA contacted Twitter multiple times for clarification on guidelines used to identify “low-quality” tweets but received no response.
Twitter also introduced a “safe search” feature in February that automatically removes tweets that contain “potentially sensitive content” from search results. A request for clarification on how this content is identified was not returned.
Being a non-government entity, Twitter has no real obligation to preserve free speech on its website. But Twitter has billed itself as a platform for free expression, and on the Twitter rules page, it says it believes in “speaking truth to power.”
Global town square
This is a role both PEN America and the ACLU take seriously. Both Nossel and Bhandari referred to the website as a sort of global town square, where everyone’s voice has equal weight.
“As a practical matter, decisions made by Twitter have a huge impact on the messages that we receive, and I hope that Twitter and other companies take those responsibilities seriously,” Bhandari said.
Nossel noted that Twitter has a financial incentive to be cautious on issues involving the balance between allowing free expression and stopping abuse.
“The power and influence of their platform depends on the free flow of ideas, so I think there are commercial reasons why they would not want to limit [free speech],” she said. “And I think for their users, they do have a kind of softer, implicit contract that they are going to be a platform in which you can express things freely.”
Bhandari said it’s important to find that balance, because if Twitter “allows a heckler’s veto to take over,” it will have a chilling effect on speech that’s similar to pre-emptively hiding content.
“One of the really important parts of that has to be transparency,” she said.
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Doctors Alarmed by Post-antibiotic Future
Unless new antibiotics are developed quickly, people will once again die from common infections. The World Health Organization has issued an urgent call for scientists to develop these new drugs, and for governments to fund the research.
Dr. Trish Perl, chief of infectious diseases at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said if there are no effective antibiotics, it will affect the entire practice of medicine.
“You all of a sudden understand what it was like to practice medicine maybe 50, 70, 80 years ago, when there weren’t antibiotics,” Perl said.
Without antibiotics, surgery will become much more dangerous. Doctors will be unable to treat diseases caused by E. coli, a bacterium that causes urinary tract infections and diarrhea. Even a virus such as the flu, which can lead to bacterial pneumonia, will mean these viruses will ultimately claim even more lives.
WATCH: Doctors Alarmed by Post-Antibiotic Future
New antibiotics needed
New antibiotics are urgently needed against bacteria that pose the greatest threat to human health. Those most at risk: residents of nursing homes, hospital patients, and children. Children may have weaker immune systems than adults, and they receive smaller doses of antibiotics than adults do.
“For the longest time we’ve had a number of different antibiotics in the pipeline at any given time, so whenever we ran out of the ability to use one, we would move to the next one,” Dr. Michael Bell, an expert in drug-resistant pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told VOA.
But that’s no longer possible. Joe Larsen, the director of biological, chemical and radiological and nuclear countermeasures at the Department of Health and Human Services, said his department drew up a list of pathogens several years ago that were becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Funding needs to change
“There are antibiotics in the pipeline, but the numbers are insufficient … to deal with the increasing rates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” he said.
Larsen’s department invests in pharmaceutical and bio-tech firms to make drugs, vaccines and diagnostics for public health emergency preparedness. Larsen is hopeful that a new antibiotic will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration later this year. He also said two to three more antibiotics are being developed that should be available in a year or two.
The WHO said it’s too expensive for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics on their own because they wouldn’t recoup their investment. Larsen agrees that the way antibiotics are commercialized needs to change.
Bacteria are constantly changing
One reason is that the more an antibiotic is used, the less effective it becomes. That’s because bacteria are constantly changing and finding new ways to resist the drugs that kill them. Once they find a way, they can pass on the gene so other bacteria can become drug-resistant as well.
To preserve the effectiveness of an antibiotic, Larsen said the profits from selling these drugs can’t be linked to the volume of sales the way the market normally works. He said the solution lies in public-private partnerships between governments and pharmaceutical or biotech firms.
In the meantime, antibiotic resistance is very real.
Lauri Hicks, who leads research on antibiotic use and resistance trends at the CDC, said, “We are seeing greater than 2 million episodes of antibiotic resistant infections each year in the U.S. alone. Twenty-three thousand of these episodes result in death.”
Don’t overuse antibiotics
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked hospitals and doctors to be careful not to overuse antibiotics. But beyond overuse, Bell, of the CDC, said there are other reasons these drugs are being rendered powerless.
“Antibiotic resistance is being generated by not only using too many antibiotics, but also by spread of infection by lack of hygiene, from unintended contact with soiled surfaces, so the infection-control side is equally important,” he said.
Patients can also help. On its website, the CDC says to take antibiotics as prescribed and finish the prescription, even if you feel better. Still, urgent action on a global level is needed to prevent the catastrophe that a post-antibiotic era would cause.
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Harvesting Power from Slow-Flowing Rivers
Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for more efficient ways to harvest energy from sustainable sources, such as the sun, wind, ocean waves and river flows. Researchers from Brown University have teamed up with a company from Rhode Island to build an innovative power generator suitable for slow-flowing rivers and tidal canals. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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At World Mobile Congress, Smart Tech Promises to Change Lives
We are in the midst of a mobile tech revolution that promises to change the way we live, say industry experts at this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, where the ‘Internet of Things’ and superfast 5G technologies are all the rage. But even the most basic mobile technology is changing lives in some of the world’s most remote parts.
The exhibit is a showcase of the latest technology — and a glimpse of what the future holds. And industry insiders at the MWC 2017 say there is a lot more to come.
Pibo, for example, is a mobile-connected robot designed to help families connect and express their emotions in the digital age. On the other hand, they could invest in a digital hang drum — a traditional instrument used in yoga, updated for the 21st century so it syncs with your smartphone.
U.S. technology giants AT&T and General Electric have come up with smart street lamps, with cameras, sensors and microphones connected to 4G mobile networks. Over three thousand are being installed in the western U.S. city of San Diego, California and will be used for traffic analysis.
But AT&T product manager Trey Winter, said the makers have bigger ambitions.
“You are going to be able to detect smart parking solutions, gunshot detections inside of a city infrastructure. Environmental features detecting weather, smog, pollution,” he said. “Really bringing to life the intelligence inside of the city.“
5G networks
Much of the buzz at this year’s show is around super-fast 5G networks — with faster download speeds and almost zero delay.
Roger Chen of CNET magazine explained that this means a “real-time connection.”
“The best example someone has given to me is a surgeon performing a surgery in one country with robotic hands in another country,” he added.
Apps offer solutions for Africa
Mobile technology is transforming the economies of many African countries, with smartphone apps ranging from herding cattle in Kenya and connecting dirty laundry to mobile washerwomen in Uganda.
Eneza, for one, uses basic mobile technology to offer access to a huge range of education. Two million students are signed up to its ‘virtual classroom‘ — and the better their grades, the more mobile airtime the parents receive.
The company’s chairman, Stephen Haggard said “they are able to access all the education they want for a subscription that’s about 10 U.S. cents per week.”
“That covers the full curriculum and will get them everything they need to do from around age eight to finishing school,” he said. “The reality in most of Africa is that mobile technology is actually the only way that you can reach huge numbers of people at low cost with any kind of content.”
A recent report by consultants McKinsey predicted that by 2025 half of sub-Saharan Africa’s billion strong population will have internet access, over two-thirds via smartphones.
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ePUMB skype chat
