LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 18 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, and Tom Meehan

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

In this episode of LPRC CrimeScience: The Weekly Review, Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio gives a breakdown of LPRC initiatives, vaccines & therapeutics, the Twitter cyber-attack, social engineering, cyber-security during COVID-19, 2020 murder rates, Amazon’s sales data and innovation, the top 5 surveilled cities, COVID-19 related deaths by population, new store openings,  and much more. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 18 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, and Tom Meehan appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of

video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. This is our weekly review. I'm joined by my colleagues Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio and our producer Kevin Tran here in Gainesville. We're going to talk a little bit about what's going on in the world and what LPRC and others are doing to help support as well. We understand that, of course, COVID-19, we're all in the midst of this, and here we go. It's been months now. Our checking with the infectious disease people, there are at least

close to 700 unique compounds in development, probably about 299 different therapeutics separate of 204 antiviral therapeutics. And bear in mind, these therapeutics are designed to use either monoclonal antibody generators or they'll take, as you all know, blood plasma from people that have had COVID-19 and then massage and manipulate a little bit and then use that as a therapeutic in all different forms and ways to boost the immune system and get a good response from people that either have the disease or may have it. And so it's a therapeutic. It's treating the disease that's already established. And there are antivirals over 200 in testing right now. Several of them look more and more promising every day. And I guess the current administration calls it Operation Warp Speed.

And I think a lot of us don't really think about that involves both vaccines and therapeutics, not just vaccines. But in one case, a team looked at 13,000 therapeutic drugs and molecules that seemed to have some kind of effect, a neutralizing effect on the virus out of 13,001 that's called LAM002-alpha is now going into phase two trials, and that seemed to be the best of 13,000. And that's just, again, one example of really about 500, a little over 500 therapeutics in trial right now, or in some phase of testing. 175 vaccines in one phase or another of development, including, remember, again, there are normally three phases of trials. Sometimes they're combining in a one, a two, or a two, or a three during this critical time across the world so but the they're trying to always establish it is as safe and then do we see

some efficacy here is there some kind of is a vaccine emoting some kind of immune response from the patient and so starting with computer simulations and going into mouse models or something along those lines and then progressing possibly into humans, again, looking at safety. And then they'll start doing, again, dose ranging. How much should we give and how often? And so that's where you'll see, well, if we give this much, if we give this much, so this group will get this much in the test, this will get this. And normally the test participants or subjects are randomly assigned or selected and then randomly assigned to different test conditions to do that. As they progress, if it looks really promising, into phase two, and that's, again, looking at safety and efficacy.

And now is when you're starting to see even more dose ranging typically. to see. And now is when you're starting to see even more dose ranging typically. And again, we do all this. This is the same process we use as experimental criminologists and having conducted over 30 of these randomized controlled trials in the criminological area, we all know in safety and security, that's the same, very same process. And if it can, it will go wrong or weird. So, I really sympathize with all the researchers out there as they look at these. Now, we've not used a double blind type of a process that you hear so much about in the media. And that just means that the researchers themselves or the data analysts themselves do not know who was treated with the agent and who was not treated with it. In other words, they got the placebo.

And the placebo can take different forms. As we all know, we hear the sugar pill, but it could be saline and all types of different substances. In our randomized control trials, it's not really practicable for us to do that. in our randomized control trials, it's not really practicable for us to do that. So we know which buildings get treated and which ones don't or what version of the treatment that the place gets. And by the way, most of our RCTs are place-based. We're not treating individuals, of course. But we've had some where the test subjects are humans, online particularly, or you all know where we've conducted dozens of behavioral intercept studies where we're intercepting either shoppers or the associates or, of course, active criminal offenders.

In that case, we might randomize what they are exposed to, and those are now going to be participant-based as opposed to place-based. So just a little bit of insight into what's going on out there and in the race to protect us, either keep us from getting the disease, or if we do, to minimize its effects. And so they look at endpoints like we do as well. And those endpoints are kind of all over the place. But typically, they want to see a difference, a clinical or observable difference in patient

function after those that received the agent, the therapeutic in this case versus those that don't. And they want to look at survival. If it's a serious disease or does it progress to that serious disease, what's the survival rate? And this is what you see a lot with cancer drugs and other things out there as well. So a lot of very, very innovative computer-based, and now with all the technology, I mentioned 13,000 agents were tested. You imagine that would have taken probably a decade or more to do that in the past.

And now they can do that sometimes in just a matter of weeks or even days. So, you know, that part of it's interesting. But just know across the entire globe that we've got hundreds and hundreds of brilliant therapeutics and vaccines under development and being tested very rigorously. And even though WorkSpeed and other programs across the world are designed to accelerate development and rigorous testing, rigor remains part of that and of the process that nobody's going to deploy anything that isn't safe for most people. And again, because in the case of a vaccine, it's going to raise our immune systems or our responses in that case, we're going to, we're going to experience some side effects. And I know with the Shingrix or shingles that most people over age 50 are advised to, to get that it's normally a twoose series. And I can tell you personally

that in both cases, you know, I felt like I had the flu, and I don't know that I've had the flu in 20 years. In both cases, I knew, here it comes, and then sure enough, you got it. But that would demonstrate a very robust immune response. And so that normally bodes well, so that now if you are exposed to it, or in this case with shingles, I guess, it's evidently already onboarded, that it's probably going to be effective to either keep you from getting it or that the seriousness of diseases is minimized. So a little bit about coming up here. We've got, I mentioned before, the all-retailer call Wednesday, tomorrow. In this case, we're recording on Tuesday. And we did get a robust response from our retailers. There's a lot of interest. So it's a lessons learned call. dissect what was experienced by the retailers in the case of COVID-19 and the same with the looting that they experienced and the property destruction, the intimidation, things like that. And then with them, kind of dissect and break down what all was going on,

what they did about it, what they were doing to repurpose people and tactics and technologies and doing to repurpose people and tactics and technologies and function and so on to address this rapidly evolving and uncertain times in both cases and sometimes both at the same time or most of the time. And then what did they readjust and then readjust again? And so we think that that kind of lesson learned process will be strong and powerful for them. And then what we're going to do is turn around and within two weeks, we will go through the lessons learned there with all solution partner call. So all solution partners can be invited to get on and listen and ask questions around what we've been hearing from the retailers without attributing to a specific retailer. So we're excited to host those two calls and to facilitate them and work to get out a lot of lessons learned pretty rapidly here, knowing that, again, pathogens, this pathogen may

be here for weeks, months, or years, but most certainly others will come. So let's keep learning and adjusting together as a community at the LPRC. And then the same thing with social disorder that goes from peaceful demonstration to something that's very dangerous, destructive, and very intimidating to people. So I'm going to go ahead and talk really quickly about Impact, what's coming up at Impact. It's going to be that first week in October. The content is, by and large, settled. The topics, the speakers, some cases the topics are already under development now. I'm sorry, the actual recording and so on is going on.

But there is, of course, as you can imagine, a retail before, during, and after crisis strikes with some very senior, very capable leaders. We've got four of them that are at that vice president level. We won't name them just yet, but we expect it to be a very robust discussion with some deep dives into the mechanisms that caused and the responses that came about. We're going to talk, then we're going to go in with two different retail chains about retail protection during periods of civil unrest and really dig into what's going on. We're going to do a lot of deep dives around LPRC Innovate and show some super cool examples using the new virtual reality lab that we've got available. That's just, it's to me, maybe I'm easily amused, but it's very exciting to work with this new tool that's been developed with the University of Florida's Digital Worlds

Institute and our team, where we can very rapidly change the look, the size, the shape, and everything, all the components of any given venue, in this case, store or parking lot normally, and then put people in there. We have ambient noise. We have special sounds. We can change the look and feel of everything. We can even put other people in there that they're doing certain things and responding certain ways so we can up our um our ecological validity game in other words the realism uh because again there's three components we're trying to do with our research anyway with the the physical uh experience the social experience and then of course the self experience and um we believe that with virtual reality we can do all three um but we're also comparing and contrasting the virtual experience with the physical experience and trying to test and rapidly test options. And so you can see it's sort of the operation warp speed here as well, where now you can come together virtually.

You can develop solution options, not just a solution, but how am I to deploy it or different ways. And then now more rapidly test those different deployment or dosing options in a safer way, in a distributed way, and so on. So that's kind of what's going on here. We're going to update on the over 30 research projects that are underway now or have already been concluded with the group. You're going to see some research on the effects of fear of crime on consumer behavior that we're going to go through with Malang. Some really interesting things we're doing with artificial intelligence and highlight other AI efforts by our solution partner members. And we want to make sure that we have a special emphasis on all the wonderful things that AI can help, how to do AI ethically and effectively as well. So you're going to see

retail offenders in the digital age. So we're going to have our normal discussions there. Tom, who's on the call now, will be one of our expert speakers in that realm. We're going to do some deep dives using video into offender decision maker as we expose them to different solutions and options. So you're going to see some posters of some other research we're doing and so on. So what I want to do with no further ado is go over to Tom Ian and let Tom tell us about some of the things that we need to know about. Tom? accounts. I'm not sure how many of the listeners are aware of some of the details, but there was a 17-year-old in Florida and two people that put together a very sophisticated attack. And it really was one person who took advantage of some social engineering and made some phone calls to Twitter, got a hold of a configuration tool. and these accounts had the highest level of protection on them. So when you think about two-factor authentication, all of the verifications,

they existed. But this really sheds a lot of light on the human effort in hacking and talk about it, I think, pretty much in every one of these podcasts that I think when we sit in our couches at home watching TV, we see the CSI type hacking event where someone's sitting in a room with 100 monitors and they're really aggressively attacking the infrastructure. That exists in the nation state attacks. That exists. But what you normally find is that usually more than 80% of cyber events or incidents are related to a human, whether it be a human error or an intentional condition.

And with this particular case, after getting the tool to get into Twitter, which is sophisticated, something that in theory required quite a bit, this individual recruited folks, went out and really recruited folks to handle the financial side of it and went to some very famous and high level people's accounts. And kind of when I say this out loud, I think to myself, everybody should have recognized this, but sent a message saying, you know, basically we're going to give back. So give us some money here and we'll double, triple, quadruple that type of money. And there is a lot of misinformation, and the prosecutors released some documents the other day.

What we know is that this 17-year-old had $3 million worth of Bitcoin, $3.35 million worth of Bitcoin, when he was taken into custody by the FBI. The FBI did a pretty elaborate case. But what it really leads us back to is that kind of three schools of thought. One is if it doesn't make sense and it's too easy, it probably isn't legitimate. The second is when someone calls portraying as someone else, if they're asking for information that's not normally asked, don't give it.

This is a real example of social engineering where someone took the time and called, you know, you're talking about high level operators at Twitter, got through and was able to get information to garner access to, you know, high level accounts, politicians, celebrities with millions and millions of followers and take advantage of that. So, you know, when you get that phone call, regardless of your business, and they're asking interesting questions, do some due diligence, call back. And if the information is sensitive, it should never be given over the phone. And then third is just the other reminders. No matter what safeguard you put in place, there's always a human element that comes

into play. I think we sometimes live behind the shadow of I use two-factor authentication, I use VPN, I'm safe. And then just wrapping it up, the Hartford sent out a really good article about considerations related to COVID-19 and cybersecurity. And, you know, I think there's a couple things on here that we just talked about is, you know, be aware of uns company before, it's obviously something that's there. While this sounds odd when I say it out loud, it happens quite often. Requests for transfers or direct deposit or electronic funds. If you're getting that email from your electric company that says your payment didn't go through, they may have very specific, accurate information trying to get you to go ahead and put your account number in again. That's one of the flags and one of the things that have been coming up. An overwhelming sense of urgency when someone asks you for something, it's an immediate and you get that email that this is an emergency

or you get that phone call that I need you to respond right away. That should be a red flag for you. Anytime anybody asks you for username, passwords, or personal information, be wary of it. You get a phone call that someone says, who am I speaking with? Well, they called you. So be very aware of those things. These are kind of the old antics of look for links that don't match, but email addresses, don't click on things you don't know. And then this is the one that I think really it was interesting that I think in the loss prevention world we talk about a lot, but probably a good reminder is independently verify the source of the phone call or the email. Requesting information is who it is.

So if Reed Hayes, who texts me, we often text each other random things. If he texts me and asks me to wire him money, I would call Reed. I wouldn't mean to disregard it, but I would call and verify it, even if it was a very small amount. If Tony called me and said, hey, can you do me a favor? I can't get into this. I need your help. And ask something that was odd. I would just pick the phone up and call. So that goes in the business world, too. If take that extra 30 seconds, it could really help with a world of hurt. All right, Tony, over to you. Thank you very much, Tom. All right, Tony, over to you.

Thank you very much, Tom. Hello, everyone. So let me start this week with some new Wall Street Journal crime data that was just published. So the Wall Street Journal did an analysis of the top 50 U.S. cities and found that murders were up 24% this year to 3,612. Shooting and gun violence also are on the increase, but other nonviolent crimes such as robberies are down. So robberies fell 11 percent in the 41 largest cities that they reported on. The top five U.S. cities with the highest percentage increase in murders were Chicago, San Antonio, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Houston. And the top five cities in terms of total number of murders, and this one was a shocker in Chicago being so high. Chicago was number one with 433 murders so far this year,

and Philadelphia was number two, almost half at 243. Then New York, then Houston, then Los Angeles. So crime is on the rise and murder is one of the indicators. Also interesting this week was the results from Amazon. So Amazon reported their second quarter results, net sales were up to $88.9 billion, up 40% for the quarter. Jeff Bezos called it another unusual quarter. What was interesting is their tripling or quadrupling of focusing on online grocery. So online grocery sales tripled this quarter, So online grocery sales tripled this quarter, and they actually focused on increasing their capacity, and they increased their capacity in the quarter to do online grocery 160%. Also interesting for Amazon store sales, primarily at Whole Foods, declined 13%. They continue to spend a lot of money to support their online sales, so they spend

over $4 billion in the quarter in incremental COVID-19 costs. They also invested $9.4 billion in capital expenditures and finance leases, which was a 65% increase, primarily on boosting fulfillment and logistics. For the quarter, they added 175,000 new jobs, and they've crossed over now a million people that work at Amazon. So it gives you an idea in terms of what's happening in the online space. In the quarter, they're also putting a continuum. As you can see, I've put a lot of focus on innovation, and this has really been a historical trend.

They spend over $15 billion a year on innovation and concepts that they've come out with, like Amazon Go, the recent Smart Shopping Guard. And I saw some interesting data on Alexa. And Alexa now has become the number one smart voice platform. And according to the latest voice platform impact ratings report, they are number one. And even that in terms of across a whole bunch of factors, their rating was 110.2, followed by Google and 97 and Apple at 38.

So Amazon, a lot of focus on the innovation and some of that innovation is reflected in the results. Switching gears, let me talk about the top five most CCTV surveilled cities in the world. So these are the cities with the most CCTV cameras per 1,000 inhabitants in 2020. cameras per 1,000 inhabitants in 2020. Not surprising, but I guess it would be surprising, 11 out of the 12 that were analyzed are in China. There was only one in the Western world. So number one is actually a city called Taiwen, which is south of Beijing. It has 119 cameras for 1,000 people. Number two was Wuxi, which is west of Shanghai, with 92 cameras for 1,000 people. And number three was, I guess I knew, but it was a surprise reminder, is London. London is the number three most surveilled city in the world, they have 67 cameras per 1,000 people. Keeping the team of top five

going, who are the top five countries in COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 in population? UK is number one with 68. Chile is number two with 45. US is number three with 43. Peru is number four with 41. And Brazil is number five with 38. So those are the top countries in terms of deaths per 100,000 in population. And let me close with some data in terms of who's opening and closing stores. This is, again, analysis that just came out from the Wall Street Journal. So they looked at it by apparel. So what's interesting is even during the pandemic, there are chains opening stores. So we had a lot of news in terms of all the closures.

So, for example, as of 2 July 30, in apparel, 1,144 stores were closed, but 403 were open. Discounts, 31 closed, 1,575 were open. Health and Beauty, 989 closed, 192 open. Home Goods, 1,458 closed, 157 open. Department stores, 302 closed, 88 open. Food and grocery, 84 closed, 421 open. And then other 974 closed and 80 open. For a total of so far 5,354 closed, 3,351 open. The biggest chains that are opening stores right now are Burlington, Skechers, Ross, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Sephora, Tractor Supply, Aldi, Casey, and Amazon. Even Amazon is planning to open 20 stores so far.

So those are the – I wanted to close on a positive note. So there are closures going on, but there are also retailers that are actually opening stores. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Reed. Yes, we all really are thankful for your ending on high notes there, Tony, each week. And thank you. And thank you, And thank you, Tom, again, for so many good insights. And we know the social engineering or sort of telephishing, if you will, is ever present. And it is just incredible. But we understand, you know, we're trusting humans by nature. and we can understand how sometimes easy

it is to fall for somebody that's just very convincing. And they only have to get one person to fall for an email or a call sometimes to do incredible, incredible damage. So I want to thank everybody for joining us today on Crime Science, the podcast. And please, you know, distance, aggressive, frequent handwashing, mask as much as possible when you're close to people so that each other can reduce the amount of viral infection that we might dose out there. And let's all stay safe. We're always here. Please reach out to us at lpresearch.org or operations at lpresearch.org. So signing off from Gainesville on behalf of Tony, Tom, and Kevin, thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. 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 Laws Prevention Research Council.