LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 119 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

LPRC Team is on the road – Listen to see where! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the newest clinical trial data for vaccines, Tik Tok potentially got hacked, an examination of global inflation and the impact on everyday households, a look at the Global Economic and Retail Headwinds, the latest cyber security trends in the industry, and a look at everything 2022 LPRC IMPACT! Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 119 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast from the LPRC, broadcasting here myself from Gainesville, Florida. And we're going to take a quick spin around the world. And literally, we've got Tony D'Onofrio winging his way around Europe. We've got Tom Meehan also on flights. But all of us are separately sending in our recordings to combine on this episode of Crime Science, the podcast, the latest in our weekly update series. We'll make it sort of brief today, and I can tell you

myself and the LPRC team and our LPRC impact planning team that gets together every year that we've talked about before, and many, many, many others are working away, seems like day and night, to prepare an amazing impact conference, our 16th conference, 16th year in a row. This one, again, back at the University of Florida. We took two years off to go virtual during the pandemic, as you know, but we're excited. A ton of content available for everybody, and we'll kind of talk a little about that in a minute. You know, looking at the COVID front, from what I can tell, not a lot of change as far as the infection rate. It's probably about 50 to 60 percent of what it was this time last year as far as weekly reported infections. We know, again, testing

differences may account for a lot of that difference. So everybody, keep yourself safe to the extent that you need and knowing how to do it at this point and take care. So what we'll do is there are also over 120 vaccine candidates, as we've talked about before again, in human clinical trials. So over 50, almost 60 now that are in phase three human clinical trials. So, that's going to give us a lot of opportunity to assess and provide scientists and physicians alike, and of course, the FDA and other approval authorities around the world, a lot to look into. But again, the ever elusive goal here is to reduce infections in addition to reducing the danger or the seriousness of getting once you are infected, which again, the current existing vaccines are very, very good at.

There continues to be a lot of debate, some evidence-based, some emotionally based, but around how many boosters, do boosters work, how do they work, it still appears that at least one and maybe two, depending on a lot of factors, seem to pay dividends here. So just stay tuned like we are to looking at the literature and see what we do to get out of this mess. So as we turn over to now LPRC and some of the updates there, what we're looking at right now is a lot of movement that we're doing. Impact Conference is our number one overwhelming goal here. robbery series on how to diagnose and map and understand and prevent in the future or act forensically to solve some of those crimes. We also are talking about earlier and earlier threat detection of people online, putting out that or in their workplace, the insider threat,

leaking their intentions, their thoughts, their sympathies with others that harm people. So these are the things that we'll be going through after our initial research and reading the literature that we could find on others that have conducted research in this area. But in our case, again, we had 11 U.S. retailers that have a threat detection assessment team to get their take on what they do, how they do it, why they do it that way, what else they're thinking about doing and what do they do with the information once they have it. So we'll talk about that at impact as well. But you're going to see a lot on the fraud front, on the supply chain front to really good learning lab breakout sessions on that. We'll be talking about the National Retail Security Survey that LPRC, that Dr. Corey Lowe, our senior research scientist, has worked long and hard on to make a few updates and hopefully enhancements to the study without making too much of a change,

and then go forward here is to make a few more alterations, all with the intent to get the best information, the most complete and accurate information from the most participants that we can get involved. So we need more participants. That's been a goal. And this year, it looks like we achieved what had been achieved in the last few years. We have just surpassed that, but also to get more and better information from each and every participant we can. So you're going to see discussion on the ARCS program. Corey will talk about that. We're going to have our founders of the LPRC, some of those, a handful of those founders in from that year of 2000, 2001, where we met and planned a little bit. Nobody had any idea what

LPRC would look like at that time, certainly. Have some of those founders in Gainesville. It's going to be a neat occasion and opportunity. And this year, by the way, I think we mentioned we not only have the golf event on Monday and we have our LPRC Board of Advisors, Board of Advisors chairs. We have four chairs plus co-chairs plus the chair, vice chairs, we call them actually. And then we've got the strategy accession. We've got LPRC Innovates program. Our advisory panel for that will be in. So we've got a lot going on on that

Monday. And then again, the Monday evening reception, that'll go on for a few hours at the amazing UF Innovate Hub Complex, going to all of our labs inside and out and virtual. It's going to be a really neat occasion and an amazing venue. And again, so different from what all of us that have been going to conferences for years are used to in the conference facilities, hotel facilities and things that are certainly nice and accommodating. But to get a break from some of that and go into a beautiful academic or university environment with all the things that are going on here is a great break. And that's why we have so many loyal participants that continue to come back for the content, for the

venues, for the networking, the social events and things like that. We're also going to be putting out information at GSX, the ASIS or as-is event, in this case, next week in Atlanta. I'll be up there. And on that Thursday, I'll be on a panel with Tony D'Onofrio. We've got James Stark there. We've got Hedgie Bartel. We've got Peter Chee and others. So we've got a pretty neat group there that will be meeting up on that Tuesday, September 13th next week. We'll also have we'll be going down to Miami. I will to Coral Gables specifically for the James Madison Institute. JMI has a is now the tech summit for the southeast and particularly Florida area.

Tech Summit for the Southeast and particularly Florida area. I'm pretty honored to be selected by the University of Florida, along with Dr. Jackson Streeter, to talk about the innovation, the incubation, the opportunities, but the leveraging of technologies of support in the state of Florida. In my case, it, of course, will be highlighting the UF Safer Places Lab, how we bring together rigorous multidisciplinary research and research and development R&D. But most importantly, integrating a series of technologies, encapsulating them in a framework tactics to, again, safeguard people, vulnerable people in places. And those gathering places could be any type of venue. It could be the pathways to and from those places. So how do we better do that? So I'm excited, really excited to participate in Atlanta at GSX, as well as the JMI Tech Summit in Coral Gables.

The following week, we've got the Loblaw team, the leadership team coming down from Canada. We're very excited to work with their senior VP, Dean Henrico, and his team coming into Gainesville next month. We've got a pretty busy month in October. We talked about the impact conference from October 3rd to the 5th in Gainesville, but we've also got a security industry association, SIA conference, where we're going to talk a little bit about retail security and loss prevention. And then on the 27th of October, the International Council of Shopping Centers will be will be participating in a conference and meeting there. The following month in November, of course, we'll be down meeting with old friends and new ones in southwest Florida for the LP Magazine, LP Foundation gathering down there.

So just a few of the happenings here around the LPRC. We'll later go into in-depth into our use case scenarios that we're putting together. Now that we've got one of our team, Dr. Justin Smith, a research scientist here, he's now counted up that we've got 389 technologies installed across our lab complex, which is a pretty amazing feat. So how are we integrating those across use cases? Things that start in the engagement lab, the mock-up store could be theft of different types. It could be different types of fraud event. It could be, of course, aggression and violence. And regardless, something happens there. People know about it. People report it.

There's some documentary evidence. The individuals escape, the individual or individuals, if it's a crew. And everything goes into action. We start pulling any and everything we can, pushing it to our security operations center lab, SOC lab, to the place user there and others that might be in the pathway of these offenders, leveraging the outdoor parking lot area that we've got. And again, all four blocks here at the UF Safer Places Lab, which is the University of Florida's Innovation Square area, the four blocks. We've got these sensor platforms across all four. So now we'll start getting real time information, identified tags, other emissions and signatures.

We can pass those again via the SOC, distribute those to where our partners, other locations that we might have, other businesses that we're affiliated with. Law enforcement partners, where appropriate and enabled, start to pass things in real time, right? Battle tracking, as it's called in the military. So we've got earlier detection. We're monitoring online. We're pulling feeds to see if there's any chatter, anybody reporting things, looking at footage forensically. Did the individuals, which way they go, where they go, because we've got cameras and other sensors along the path. If somebody throws something out the window, picks up somebody, abandons, steals another vehicle, does something like that, we'll have that information. The LPR

that we've got from FLOG Safety down in the southwest parking lot is where the vehicle pulls into. Now we know that vehicle's there. The SOC distributes that information to all those that need it very rapidly with the platform, the live view platform that we got with the sensors. We're now using the PTZ and other sensors to understand who all's there, what they're doing in that new lot. How do we fuse that together? Do we warn other places? Do we help vector in our law enforcement partners and so on? And again, while we're also still continually pulling together any and every shred of data that's been collected along that pathway, that journey to and from. Now we can go back retrospectively. When did people come in? Who did they meet before? Outside, inside, in the ecosystem and so on. So a lot going on. You can see the opportunity to leverage and pull together data, integrate all that information across all the platforms, do it cost effectively,

but most importantly, to enable us to better deter. If we can't do that, disrupt. If that's not working, displacing them, then how do we best document all along the pathways for better incapacitation of active criminal offenders to safeguard? So, without further ado, I'm going to turn it over, the microphone over to Tony D'Onofrio. So, Tony, take it away. Thank you, Reid, disruptive future of retail that potentially also includes a recession, let me summarize the global headwinds that we all face the rest of this year into next year from that presentation. Let me start with the world growth challenges from a gross domestic product point of view. So GDP growth was very robust globally in 2021 at 6.1%.

Growth is now projected to drop to 3.2% in 2022 and then now down to 2.9 percent in 2023. For advanced economies such as the United States, global GDP growth was 5.2 percent in 2021. It will drop again to an even smaller number, just 1.4% in 2023. For the United States, the numbers are 5.7% for 2021, dropping to 2.3%, dropping to a very low 1%. And for the Eurozone or European zone that uses the Euro is 5.4% in 2021, dropping to 2.6% and then dropping to 1.2% in 2023. So again, dramatic drops. And if you get a copy of that presentation, again, which you can track to social media, you'll see that forecast and more. The data that I just shared with you is from the International Monetary Fund. Additional risks that are happening around the world are both political, military, economic,

and environmental. And the economic risks, for example, for the U.S. is worsening U.S.-China relationships. Monetary tightening leads to a deeper US recession, newly highly aggressive variants of COVID-19 that could emerge. And then on the other side of the world in China, the zero COVID policy prompts continued sharp slowdowns. On the other risk in terms of political, the Russia cuts off supply to Europe, that just happened, and also the EU-China trade war breaks out is another potential risk. The war in Ukraine

has potential to escalate to a broader conflict, that is a major risk on the military front also cyber wars and military risk and also conflict erupts between China and Taiwan that is a military risk so lots of risks in terms of gas exposure in terms of gas purchases from Russia in Europe there are some countries highly exposed more than others the two, one or two of the largest economies in Europe, Germany and Italy have higher exposure and they have substantial risk this winter to run into shortages. Hungary even has higher exposure, but they actually have cut a separate deal with Russia to guarantee their own gas supply through the winter. Again, it is

expected this will be a very tough winter in Europe in terms of gas shortages, which will lead to economic challenges. And in fact, there was a survey just published which asked what percent of countries are worried, for example, in terms of social unrest? In the United Kingdom, it's 57%. In Germany, it's 64%. And in France, it's 69%. And in Poland, it jumps to 75%. Strikes are also a big problem in Europe and percent of the countries that are worried about strikes are 57 percent in the UK, 44 percent in Germany, 65 percent in France and 63 percent in Poland. So high risk

of disruption coming up in Europe which again it impacts the rest of the world. I do believe and I actually point this out in the material, and you will see it in the presentation and soon in an upcoming blog, U.S. also continues to have a risk of too many stores. U.S. has the highest per capita square footage of retail space available. It's 23.5 square feet per person. Canada is second at 16.8 and Australia is third at 11.2. That is much higher than in many other parts of the world, including Western Europe. So that is a challenge because that means there are too many stores and there will be continued closures.

many stores and there will be continued closures. In the presentation, there are two charts that point to what happened to retail during at the peak of the pandemic and what's happening now. So at the peak of the pandemic in April 2020, specialty soft goods, which includes apparel, were down 89 percent. Department store sales were down 89%. Department store sales were down 45%, and restaurant sales were down nearly 49%. Retail really at that time transitioned to just focusing on essentials and self-preservation. Fast forward to July 2022, everybody's green with convenience and gas having the highest growth at 40.6%, followed by restaurants at 20% and online at 12%. But that's really masked by what's happening with inflation. If you factor in the high inflationary time that we're in,

actually most of the sectors are negative. that we're in, actually most of the sectors are negative. And our challenge really with restaurants and online, the two sectors that are still remain positive after you factor in inflation. The hardest hit sector is department store by inflation in terms of overall growth. The economic impact or economic output is really impacting generations differently. The unluckiest generation right now in terms of their economic output and wealth is really the millennials. They've been hit hard for a while

and looks like they're going to continue to be hit hard going forward. The older generation have done better in terms of building wealth, but the unlikeliest are the millennials in terms of the challenges that we're going through now. Inflation has a little bit slowed down in the US, but it's still going strong in the UK and in the Eurozone overall. We also have a major impact of shrink inflation right now, where products are basically shrinking, but the manufacturers are still really charging the same products. And that's true across all kinds of products and consumers are noticing it very, very heavily, especially in places like snacks, pantry items, frozen foods, and meat. The items are getting smaller, but the prices are the same. One of my favorite inflation index that I point to in the presentation is the

English breakfast, which has gone up dramatically. And this is all the components that make up a British English breakfast. That price of inflation is extremely high. When you look at manufacturers, they're going through similar problems as the rest of industry. So their biggest problem right now, what do you anticipate when they answer the question, what do you anticipate will be the greatest challenge in 22? Their biggest challenge is the same as many others, which is securing and returning scale labors,

followed by managing supply chain relationship, followed by some healthcare costs. When they answer the question, how has your company been affected by the global supply chain issues? Again, similar type of answers on the manufacturer's side. They're experiencing shipping delays, production delays, and stockpiling and inventory issues similar to everyone else. In the presentation, I point to two charts that show ports and where we're at with ports.

And remember, there was a big discussion about shortages and ports. The port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, much better, much improved. But if you move to the other side of the world, in Shanghai, they are totally still locked up, lots of ships still waiting to be loaded and offloaded, which leads to challenges in terms of global supply chain. Some of these caused by the China shutdown.

So those are the major global headwinds that we all face right now that I'll share this week. More on this in future blogs and articles. Plus, again, you can get a copy of the presentation online. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Thank you. Well, thank you, Reid. Thank you, Tony.

I am recording remote today. And just wanted to kind of cover a couple cybersecurity and risk topics. I want to start by talking about TikTok. I want to start by talking about TikTok. So I would guess around September 3rd, I noticed some chatter about a TikTok breach. I think it's important to note that this breach has not been confirmed. So this could be early news or could be a hoax. But so interestingly enough, on the open web, on Twitter, there were a couple of users passing out a Twitter breach. Keep in mind that some of these users are just regular folks. But then a couple of cybersecurity companies also talked about it. So I did a little research and actually downloaded a sample file.

And it looks like it contains information related to a data breach for TikTok. By no means can I validate it. TikTok officially stated September 5th that there was no breach of source code or no data was stolen. And that the information that was found was completely unrelated to the company. There's a hacking group called Against the West created a topic in a hacking forum that there was a breach of both TikTok and WeChat. The user shared screenshots of the alleged data and actually linked it to the data. And I actually did not go through that form. I went through another and I did see data

which contained payment records and usernames and some other information that appeared to be related to TikTok. I did not see anything related to the WeChat piece. Again, I would caution anybody to know whether this is true or not. The official response from TikTok was this. It's an incorrect claim. incorrect claim. Our security teams investigated this statement and determined that the code in question is completely unrelated to TikTok's backend source code, which has never been merged with WeChat data. That's from TikTok. So what the hacking group, the group, and when I say hacking group, I want to make sure that I'm clear. This is a forum. This is not a group of hackers.

This is actually a forum similar to we would use that discuss cyber security trends and topics claim that there was back-end source code transaction data as well as username and username and user information at least and there are multiple versions of sample on on the internet throughout the internet i throughout the internet. I actually, again, looked at some of this data myself. The reality is that there's no way that I can validate anything more. It could be just mixed junk code. So it could be old code or open source code and transaction data that's not related. But stay tuned to this space. We have heard in before that this has happened in the past where there is not actually a breach and it's a hoax or there's misinformation out there. But I always like to bring it up here. We've numerous times been the first to report our little podcast here. So I thought it would be relevant to put out there.

to talk about and I'm not going to spend too much time on it because it is a topic that we talk about literally every single episode is zero day vulnerability is both Apple Chrome had zero days over the last week. To remind everybody, a zero day is a vulnerability that wasn't known before. They released patches and updates. If you are using an iPhone or Chrome update now, also Microsoft Edge had one release. This is a common thing that's going to keep occurring. As we continue to grow with the use of app-based devices and continue to move more online, we'll continue to see these zero days coming.

The most important advice, and I know I sound like a broken record here, is to please patch early and often. When there's an update available, do the update. It will pay dividends later on in life. I wanted to just switch gears a little bit to ransomware. Something else we already talked about is the second largest school district in the country was hit by ransomware. So when we talk about cyber incidents and the increases in cyber incidents and ransomware, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest district in the United States, disclosed that there was a ransomware attack. The school district enrolls more than 640,000 students within it. So very, very large piece here. This continues to be a challenge for us. And I think as tools get better, the bad guys look for ways to circumvent those tools. I think education and awareness is the key here. Continuing to remind people to not click on things, not download things, not be enticed by what's going on is what's there. Ransomware attack is here where the files are encrypted. I'm not sure yet what will come of this if there was another cyber incident in relationship to it. But it just continues to show the vulnerabilities for all of us here when we talk about ransomware attacks and what's occurring throughout the globe.

ransomware attacks and what's occurring throughout the globe. We talked about, I think, two weeks ago, kind of some of the warnings that are coming out of the European regions. So Italy and other European countries are being continuously warned of heightened attack vectors related to cyber. I think it's a very, very important thing to continue to keep an eye on here in the United States. We continue to see an increase in these attacks. They are for monetary gain, so there is obviously a motive behind them. This is not the day of just disruptive attacks. These are almost always commercial in motive. always commercial in motive. And then the last story of today related to cyber and risk,

which I thought was a really interesting one, was out of the Ukraine where there are actually a honeypot that was created by the Ukraine intelligence service to gather Russian intelligence by setting up fake dating apps to gather information from Russian soldiers. So we talk about the use of internet and the use of social media. It's another example of how governments can use it and how easily it can be used for other things. So I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. I just thought it was a very interesting story because we talk a lot about social media here on the podcast. And then I'll wrap up with what I've been talking about the last few weeks on the FusionNet and what the FusionNet is designed for. The LPRC FusionNet is a place where retailers, law enforcement, and academia can share information

about major events and civil unrest throughout the country and the globe. And while we're not activated today, we're constantly monitoring some of the information that's out there, potential civil unrest and major disturbances. I know we're going into a hurricane season and we will often have opportunities there. But as we approach the midterm elections, opportunities there. But as we approach the midterm elections, I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, and I don't think that I've seen anything like this. There is just a tremendous amount of chatter about potential civil unrest and what it means for all of us and where it's going. So when we look at our active intelligence, open source intelligence gathering, social media monitoring, whichever

you call it in your organization or your special operations command center, your SOC. If you aren't already planning for some level of civil unrest in the upcoming months, please look at some of the information that's been made available right now. Most of the agencies are saying to prepare for civil unrest in most major metropolitan cities of some sort, regardless of what the outcome of these elections are. So we'll continue to monitor that. We'll continue to gather information and share it as it becomes available here on the podcast and through the normal channels with the LPRC. And with that, we are looking to see everybody in October at Impact, and I can't wait to see everybody in person. Very excited. I know it's coming. If you haven't

registered, there's still time to register. And back over to you, Reid. Well, thanks so much, Tom and Tony. And again, to our producer, Diego Rodriguez, who is really, really working hard on impact on Crime Science, the podcast on our weekly Connect e-newsletter and much, much more. Big, big shout out and thanks to you. Big thanks to each and every one of you all listeners. Again, keep us posted. What's important to you? And keep us posted what's important to you. LPResearch.org is the website, of course, and operations at LPResearch.org is the email address. And we'd love to hear from you, get you involved. So hopefully we'll see you in Gainesville October 3rd through the 5th for an amazing, amazing loss prevention asset protection conference called LPRC Impact. Take care.

Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.