LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 65 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: July 11, 2021

European Travel is Changing! LPRC IMPACT 2021 is In-Person from October 4th to the 6th! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss these topics and more, including the LPRC Product Protection Summit is Coming on July 16th, Hackers lock 1 million devices, Non Vaccinated Individuals are 99% of fatalities of COVID deaths, Israel leads in population vaccinated, and Consumer Habits have Changed because of COVID. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 65 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. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-s sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to

improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance 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 podcast today our latest in their weekly update series and i'm joined as usual by our co-host tony d'onofrio and tom mehan our producer diego rodriguez and uh we're going to talk just a little bit about what's going on around the world that affects particularly retailing and those that are assigned to boost and protect it. And so talking a little bit about as per normal, the last year and a half, we'll talk about the global pandemic a little bit and the idea that the delta virus excuse me variant of the virus that came out of or first discovered in india and then now a delta x version of that both seem to be pretty prolific readily transmissible even more so than the normal

and the earlier variants we saw in fact now reported in about 90 countries, and it's just a phenomenal, phenomenal spread. But again, most of these infections seem to be in the non-vaccinated or those that only had one dose or early, early after their first or second dose. So stay tuned on that from what the research looks like. This new Lambda variant looks even more concerning. from what the research looks like, this new Lambda variant looks even more concerning. I saw data from Israel talking about that while they are heavily vaccinated, those that were only had one didn't have the same protection, but the two seem to be very efficacious. But you see this drop from getting, having symptomatic disease from around a 95% efficacy to around 65 in Israel. But the point is very few people that are infected exhibit symptoms. It looks like in the data or if they

do, they're not serious. So, you know, that's again, what the vaccine is designed to do is not necessarily reduce the probability of infection even though data show that it has and can do that, but again, to reduce the probability of symptoms and certainly serious disease or even hospitalization or fatality. So that's what they're designed for, as my understanding is that multiple vaccines do continue to work on. In the literature, I can see all types of different boosters of different types, depending on where it goes and where we need to go to maintain protection.

I saw this morning that somewhere around worldwide now, we've got about 3.3 billion people have been dosed with a vaccine, 3.3 billion humans dosed. Of that, roughly a billion that are fully vaccinated around the world with these vaccines. The United States, we're looking at about 330 plus million Americans have been dosed in some way or doses out there rather, some way or doses out there rather with 160 million Americans fully vaccinated. There were some early suggestions that the J&J one dose might not have some of the efficacy against some of these variants, but I was looking at studies yesterday that showed that in fact J&J seems to be holding up pretty robustly, even though there's, as we've talked about before, a lot of testing going on about mixing and matching vaccines or adding different boosters, maybe coming in with one of the mRNA

vaccines after J&J. But the data right now don't seem to indicate that that's necessarily critical or important or even very useful yet. But again, like everything, these viruses affect everybody so differently. And it's amazing. They came out saying yesterday or this morning that more than 99% of the people who've died from COVID-19 in the month of June, last month now that we're in July,

were not vaccinated. So we're seeing that's what's happening is that the non-vaccinated feel very comfortable because so many Americans, in this case, Americans are vaccinated, but they're not protected in the same way that those that are vaccinated are. And so that's where we're seeing most of the serious disease. And it looks like almost all, if not all fatalities, just very 1% of the fatalities are vaccinated. And bear in mind, when you see these vaccinated people that come down with serious disease, or even in the rare, rare case of a fatality, as we look through the data, it looks like those are what we expect in this case, very vulnerable people, either because of some disease or immune compromisation or age related. And so that

seems to be part of what's going on there, as one would expect. So again, very, very effective, there as one would expect so again very very effective very efficacious protection from these these vaccines it looks like the delta variant in one study in israel that the pfizer shot seemed to almost halt the spread of the news of the new variant And so it provides the efficaciousness against moderate or mild disease when again, from 95 roughly percent to about 64%, that actually seems to reduce or even halt the spread of that variant within those that are vaccinated. So it makes it tough to get a foothold in that way. So what we'll talk about a little bit now is, let's go through, there are roughly right now looking at new vaccine types coming down. We've talked about each week, the preclinical is still around now, 80 in preclinical phases, the human clinical phases, phase one, two, or three. In phase one, 50 vaccine candidates,

we've seen that grow, 37. So some have moved into phase two clinical trials, and we now have 32 in phase three. One moved into emergency use authorization, so we now have nine that are authorized for emergency use, and then there are eight additional around the world outside the U.S. in this case that are fully authorized. Again, both Pfizer and Moderna, and my understanding coming up here, J&J, look good for being fully authorized, particularly after we've seen over a billion humans being vaccinated with these mRNA, with very, very, very, very few, any kind of serious blowback from that. There are the occasional ones. It's just a matter of determining if they are caused by the vaccine, There are the occasional ones.

It's just a matter of determining if they are caused by the vaccine. But they certainly don't seem to rise above the background of the normal percent of humans that would have that particular ailment anyway, vaccine or no vaccine. So amazing bit of science here. Amazing bit of operation work speed, making sure that we're able to produce, manufacture, and distribute these vaccines so rapidly. And again, with the United States with over 320 million Americans and dispersed so widely in so many different urban and rural and suburban areas, it's just an incredible feat that we were able to so rapidly vaccinate so many quickly with something so effective. Just absolutely unprecedented for those that follow science pretty closely. We talked a little bit about some of the long haulers and some of that. Now they're seeing more and more about how the structure of blood cells and how this COVID-19

disease coming from the SARS-CoV-2 virus affects those cells in a bad way. We talked about the effects on brain matter and why so many Americans and many, many of us have family and friends that have this still with loss of smell or changes, taste or smell. And again, coming from loss of gray matter, actual brain cells and so forth. So serious disease that we want to take seriously. We're following very closely, of course, what's going on with the effects and how different areas are changing the rules to reduce the transmission of the virus and so on. And again, with mass vaccination, we're still

seeing hospitalization rates much more tolerable, even when infections seem to spike in different areas that have had heavier vaccination now. So it seems to be the key to everything in this case. Another thing to think about is we've got here, especially here with us in Florida, I've probably ridden out 30 or more hurricanes and seen some pretty serious devastation, but we've got another one also bearing down on us right now as we speak today on this podcast. So everybody stay tuned and stay prepared. This comes on top of a record number of shark attacks. Again, I grew up near those of us that surfed and had friends that were bitten by sharks,

especially around New Smyrna Beach, and another child was bitten yesterday. And so we've had quite a record number here in Florida of those types of things. But buckling down on this, especially too, we've seen what happened with the condominium complex on the beach, that horrific collapse. And now they're going out and trying to understand what's going on with that. Is that unique or is it something that might be more widespread? With that, is that unique or is it something that might be more widespread? Moving into what's going on at the LPRC, we're really, really excited as we do the deep planning.

We've got Chad McIntosh coming in today and he's going to spend a few days with us to go through the logistics, making sure that we iron everything out after 16 of these impacts. We've got a pretty good routine down. We make sure we do everything top notch. We're excited to have a full occupancy impact conference that first week in October coming up here at the very beautiful University of Florida campus, hosted in the rights to such a large crowd. We encourage everybody to get in here. Some of the topics, Kenna Carlson, our research team leader, was sharing with me. She's done a really good job the two prior impacts on curating and helping present and pull together all the content that we

put out there. So some of the things we're looking at, intelligence-led and problem-oriented loss prevention, how we use RFID and other sensors to make sense of what we've got, where it is, where it's going, what's happening to it, a big focus on RFID and organized retail crime. We've got a top-notch team from Macy's talking about how they couple together different sensors, CCTV and RFID being two, to have a much clearer picture, much better diagnosis, much more precise targeting of what they do and how they do it, how they've discovered items that they thought just went missing that were stolen or those they thought were being stolen were not. There were other issues with it. So amazing what can happen there. there were other issues with it. So amazing what can happen there. We're looking a lot at the role of retail and community crime prevention, how to much better and more focused, in a more focused

way, engage with law enforcement, but partnerships, partnerships and engagement in different community hotspots to help out that area of the community, those people in that area um uh for the betterment of the area but for the betterment of the overall community and also reducing crime and victimization from certain very select people in the the community that we all know um that we deal with so a lot more going on there talking about the science and working with Target Corporation on how to do this, how to leverage a lot of science, a lot of research on community engagement, on collective efficacy, and what we're doing there about that. A lot going on right now, of course, with curbside pickup, even though it's so widespread and people have been doing it for six months to a year and six

months, some for much longer. But so many of our retailer members out of the 68 chains we work with would like to get better and better, more efficient, make it a better customer experience. But at the same time, part of that customer or user experience is a safety of the customer from car accidents, from robbery, the same for the employees. Some of the things that have been coming from that, the value exchange is huge for us at VX. So we'll be talking a lot about value exchange and how people give up. We all give up. Again, we've talked about this, our privacy. In other words, we will use our face for facial recognition on our phones. We'll be posting and tweeting and everything else

out there. Our vehicles have auto tags and RFID transponders to go through toll booths and so on. So all day, every day, we're exchanging something for convenience, entertainment, and safety or security. So we'll be doing a good dive. We'll be seeing an example of a new technology that frees up customers driven selection of products by giving up their facial features where they don't have they don't have to opt into that. They can just summon an employee. So how does that look in the real world? In addition to the sort of the philosophical and community things around that, we've got some absolute experts coming in here on the response to the active shooter active assailants and how to a little little better on preparation to prevent preparation to more rapidly and effectively and of course safely respond and

recover from these horrible events that are all too common. They seem to wax and wane, to spike and recede, and then spike again. So we're going to have some experts in here around that. Synergy and science. We're going to talk a lot about collaboration and how some retailers are using this evidence-based or science-based tactics to improve what they do, how they do it, the outcomes, most importantly, that they get out of that. You'd be surprised maybe, or not so much, some of the retailers that are reaching out saying, all right, that's it. Instead of just doing stuff, we really want to get more focused

on what we do. We don't just want to share ideas with our counterparts or internally in the building. We would like to really do a little more experimentation and get an idea of what really does work or work best. What are the best options there? We're going to be looking also on the active shooter. We're doing more and more with risk mapping. And I think any LPRC members know that during our cluster calls throughout the pandemic and going forward, we map all demonstrations, those that turn risky, those that turn dangerous, and then things about those areas that had multiple overlapping problems and so on. So using mapping allows us to get a little bit ahead of the problem and allow the retailers operating stores or other parts of their ecosystem in those environments to be more informed and have a better heads up.

We're going to have some people going in. We've been doing a lot deeper dives on organized retail crime, more dissecting the individuals, the groups, the way they move, shoot, and communicate, how they operate. And there's so many great platforms now out there. So we'll see some case studies around understanding, defining for more precise prevention and protection from organized retail criminals and crews and groups. We'll be looking at out-of-stocks, some new research coming out

around that with Procter & Gamble. Nobody should have greater insight and a greater opportunity than P&G. And Kenna and the team have been working pretty closely with Kalina and the P&G team. They've got so many great products that are so readily stolen because of the size, the desirability, the availability to convert them to cash and so on. So we're excited about that. So just a little insight, a little look inside of that. Look for flusher calls and fusion net that come up when we need it. But more things going on in the lab. So we invite you between now and the first week in October of the next few months. If you'd like to come into Gainesville, we'd like to host you.

We've got a big team coming in from a huge retailer I can't name yet. So coming up here pretty shortly, but a lot going on here at the University of Florida, a lot going on here at the Loss Prevention Research Council. So long drawn out, but I wanted to give everybody a quick briefing here. Let me go over to Tony D'Onofrio. And Tony, if you can fill us in. Thank you very much, Reid. And to build on all the great work that's going on in Florida. We continue to plan for LPRC Europe. We're still planning a July 21st event in cooperation with TJX Europe. The only thing we're waiting for is for the travel restriction to be lifted, which are scheduled right now for July 19th.

So if that happens, activity will take place. We also may go to a virtual scenario if the travel restriction does not get lifted, but it's always better in person. We already have multiple major retailers coming into London to join us, and really would be great to actually do a live event. We'll have to see what the UK does. have to see what the UK does. So let me actually build on some of the other data that Reid talked about in terms of what's going on with vaccination around the world. And actually, Statista this past week just published, as of July 3rd, which countries are leading the full vaccination rates. Number one is Israel, with 60% of the population now vaccinated. Number two is Bahrain with 59%. Mongolia was surprised.

They're at 49%. United States was next at 47%. Germany at 38%. Italy at 33%. And France at 31%. So the world is making progress in getting more of the population vaccinated. And that is actually seen, as I'll talk about here in a few minutes,

in terms of what's actually happening to Europe. COVID-19 switching topics has indeed changed how consumers shop and actually perceive stores. And actually, PwC does a monthly review of global consumer insights. In their June report, what they said is they basically restated the obvious that the pandemic has been the greatest health crisis in modern history. As consumers have adopted new habits, businesses have wondered whether any of these would stick, and the June report confirmed that the changes are sticking, signifying a historic and dramatic shift in consumer behavior. Consumers are now more digital, more health conscious, more eco-friendly, more price sensitive, and are shopping more local. 56% of consumers are more price oriented. 54% are

focused on saving. 51% are more digital. 50% are more eco-friendly. 49% are more healthy. And 46% are more data conscious. And also interesting, 43% went to shop more local. The really interesting data for me is how do people feel about the U.S. economy, 36% of the consumer, and this is actually a global survey, so not just U.S., but in general worldwide in the countries they serve at 36% are more optimistic about the economy, 31% see no change. Then a surprising 29% are less optimistic. And that tells you that some parts of the world still have some catching up to do. We are shopping a lot more in physical stores. The percentage went up from 41% in March to 47% in June. Online was also increasing from 23% in June to from 19% in March.

Fast and reliable delivery plus making sure that the product is actually in inventory, going to what Reid was talking about, out of stocks, those remain the top consumer priorities. out of stocks, those remain the top consumer priorities. Most shoppers put health and safety concerns now ahead of environmental concerns. The top three reasons that are driving brand loyalty in June were reliability as defined by the brand always delivering what they promise, products that are readily available, and exceptional customer service and loyalty programs. And the top three categories where global customers are planning to spend more in the next six months are grocery, 37%, takeaway food, 32%, and home entertainment, 30%. And let me close by talking about what it's like to travel internationally during COVID. I actually happened to be recording today from sunny Italy, from my hometown just south of Rome. And I had traveled here from Spain where I spent the entire last week.

So let me take you through in terms of how I got here and what does it look like. So US, Italy, Spain are considered amber countries, which means when you travel there, you must follow a set of rules or restrictions. One of the things that I learned quickly from friends that have traveled internationally already, you need to do your homework. There are requirements to enter in each country. And Delta actually is a pretty good way to let you know what they are by country. For Spain, for example, I had to fill out an online form that stated exactly where I was going to be in the country. That form generated a QR code, which I needed to show at the port of entry,

which in my case was Madrid. It's the first thing that they scan. And then interestingly enough, they spend two to three minutes scanning your CDC vaccination card to make sure it's authentic, which I'm not sure how they actually tell. And then they get to your passport. So it gives you an idea in terms of how much they look for those documents that trace you and also that show that you've been vaccinated. Also interesting that not all countries use the same form. Surprising to me, Italy is part of the European Union, yet they require a different form.

And again, the website from the airline was very helpful. One of the surprises, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised, masks everywhere. So by the time I boarded my plane in Greenville, South Carolina, to the time I exited Madrid, which was roughly 20 hours, I never really took off the mask, other than to eat briefly. And then if you keep it off too long, they remind you to put the mask back on. And that includes sleeping. That includes everything you can imagine. And on this side of the pond, because of the vaccination, I'm not as high as, for example, other parts of the world that we just talked about. That mask wearing actually expands to everything from offices to public transportation to hotels to taxis.

So you're wearing your mask a lot. So that was not one of the fun parts of the international travel. Now, this is the beginning of July. The rules will change. As I said, July 19, the UK will restate their rules. So it's very important if you're going to travel anywhere that you check what the rules are. The most strict country to get into Europe is the UK. And unfortunately, that's where we're launching LPRC Europe. The current

restrictions are for five to 10-day quarantines as you enter the country. And again, we're monitoring that because that would not work in terms of getting there. So my big surprise was entering Italy this morning. Really no checks, no vaccine cards, reviews, no temperature. You just walk right through as if everything was back to normal. The only difference, you're wearing a mask. So I guess, and Italy actually has, they go by colors here. They're white. So the whole country has gone to white, which means that outside you no longer need to wear masks.

And only indoors will you be required to wear masks. So interesting traveling for the first time internationally. In short, what I would say, do your homework. Check with the airline. Their website will give you. To return to the United States is not as simple as getting back on the plane. You need a negative COVID test, 48 to 72 hours, depending on the country, which I'm in the process of scheduling, because I'll be returning actually at the end of this week. So not a fun process to travel internationally.

But for me, my family's here and I have not been here in a year and a half. Good to get through it. But we still have a lot of work to do to make it easier. So with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Thanks, Tony. Thank you, Reed. So just a kind of repetitive theme is ransomware. Tony, thank you, Reed. So just a kind of repetitive theme is ransomware. So this weekend, over the 4th of July weekend, because we tape on Tuesdays and it's the 6th, there was a massive ransomware attack that the information is still coming out. This is tied to, believed to be tied to, because they claimed it a Russian group connected with the rebel group, which was a group that's probably best known for the JBS meat attack. The White House is taking kind of

a different approach here and being very active and vocal about this. The Russian government at this point has claimed that there is no affiliation, which could be true, but it's highly unlikely with this level of sophistication that the government isn't at least aware of it going on. But what's interesting about this attack is that the group is asking for a $70 million ransomware, which is the largest ransomware kind of ransom that they've ever asked for at $70 million. And it's to basically make the unlock keys public versus

going to each individual computer. They're claiming that it's affected about a million computers throughout, individual computers throughout the US and North America. They're not really being super specific here. And because it's just happened over the weekend, more information will come through. So a million devices, while that is a lot of devices, just to put some context to it, there's, I don't know, 128 million households as of 2020 in the United States, and 75% of them have a personal computer in them. So just think of that. That doesn't include the businesses. So when you think of the sheer magnitude of the number of computers that are out there,

you're far past the 100 million mark. And that's just in the consumer space. So while this number is daunting, it's important to note that it's a very small percentage overall that the unfortunate part here is that ransomware from an attack is not a small percentage and it is the predominant choice of attack business conference uh compromised email would be the second through phishing but this this kind of just continues to play on what we talk about is the modern attack vector has changed where more damage can be done through ransomware than some traditional methodologies. And yes, there are some things that we all can do like online backups at home and at work that are offline backups. I apologize, it's an offline backup so that when you back it up into that old hard drive, and I think if you

go back years ago, we were all saying back up into that old hard drive and i think if you go back years ago we were all saying back up into the cloud now we're saying you know back this up on a device that you can unplug that way your your backup doesn't become contaminated restricting permissions in a business environment is another one limiting the amount of things people can do and then the one of the biggest ones is keeping software up to date and then don't click you you know, unknown links is the other one. When we, we talk about, when we're clicking to ensure that we know who it's from, don't download anything. Don't, you know, these, this is kind of the typical kind of repetitive conversations,

but it's important to note that if we go over the last three months and you look at the level of attacks that you've seen from the colonial pipeline to JBS to this, they're progressive and that's concerning. And I'm not going to get into too much detail, but there was a really interesting article that was written and it got a lot of attention because the title of it was the next pandemic will be digital and it's already happening. What you need to know about the growing set of ransomware. And there was a lot of pushback because COVID-19 being a pandemic, but what the writer really highlights is the sheer magnitude of ransomware and the long-term impacts it will have on the economy and some of the dangers that occur with it.

While I'm not sure that the, I'm not sure I would have used the same wording for a title because of COVID, but what I would say is that the article and the substance of it is spot on in the sense that we have a really significant danger to all of us here, both commercially and personally, of the cyber incidents that are occurring. Switching gears to another topic, and I'm only going to touch on a high level just because I thought it was interesting, but it didn't really make as much news as I thought it would. But in Massachusetts, police arrested a group of heavily armed men during a traffic stop. They were a militant group over just before the 4th of July weekend. And there was a standoff

on I-95. And for anybody that's ever driven anywhere on the East Coast, you would know what I-95 is. And this group was an anti-law, not anti-law enforcement, anti-law and kind of offshoot group. But what really it highlighted is two things is one, the news really didn't totally talk about it as much as you thought they would. And then the suspects were scattered from all over New York and New York, really, there was one outside New York and they were traveling to Rhode Island to train. And the interesting part about where they were from in New York is that they were from different parts of the Bronx and Long Island. There was someone from Rhode Island. And really, again, this kind of reminds us of the potential for civil unrest at any time. In addition to the FBI's warning of domestic terror, these are domestic terrors in some fashion. While

they weren't actually doing anything but driving on the highway, happened to get caught in a traffic stop, they were heavily armed. They did not exchange any type of violence with the police. They were talking to them about it. But this is a story that we'll continue to monitor. But interestingly enough, really did not get a lot of press. And it wasn't kind of the typical the Boston Globe and ABC picked it up, but it wasn't hugely pushed out. Yet, you know, it not it closed down an interstate for several hours, you know, on one of the busiest travel weeks of the year via car. So I thought that was really interesting, you know, thinking of something occurring on July 2nd or July 3rd and closing down on a highway with militants. You would think there'd be more about it, but we'll keep an eye on that and let everybody know. All right, back over to you, Reed. All right. Thank you so much, Tom.

Thank you, Tony. As always, great information. The cyber threat's incredible. I think it is good news, as you said, that the FBI has been ramping up over the last few years and now starting to try out some new tools here recently to help out those that are being hacked, set up traps for the hackers, and even go after the goods, follow the money, take away the rewards, right? We call it benefit denial. So thanks, everybody, for that. Again, I want to encourage everybody to visit lpresearch.org, check us out, set a trip here into Gainesville, or set it up, and we'll do a virtual tour. We've got all, we use Matterport

like they do in real estate. All of our labs are set up. It's super cool. We refresh those as we add more technologies. We've got roughly 140 technologies alone, just in an engagement lab, we call it, with more on the way as the pandemic slowly lifts and the technology guys can get in here and install their best and brightest technologies and link them together with others. So I want everybody to ask you to stay safe out there, stay in touch. And from Gainesville, signing off. Thank you. 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 Thank you.