LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 98 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Only two more episodes away from our 100th Episode! Visit the LPRC Labs at our Open House on April 27th and 28th! Block’s customer information gets breached! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the combinations of different vaccines and their efficacy, a look at the latest data on the state of the US grocery industry, encryption changes in computer data protection, voice messages are used as phishing messages, and a look at the dramatic increase in technology use accelerated by the pandemic. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 98 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, the podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series from the LPRC. And today we're talking about all things retail and global and pandemic and research. And I'll go ahead and start here. And as always, joined by colleagues Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio, our producer Diego Rodriguez. So let's get started here. We'll just touch just a little bit on the pandemic. Here we are 28th month 28 months now dealing with this global pandemic the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease that can stem from that virus and I saw some physicians saying the

other day we may be done with the pandemic but it's not necessarily done with us. And it's sort of the old saying about war, you may not like war, but war might like you. And so the point of all that is we always, always need to be prepared and always be a little cautious and take precautions in our daily lives for safety reasons with anything, you know, including harm from another human. So stay alert, stay alive, as they used to say when I was in the Army. So moving over to looking a little bit at the infection, there's, of course, variants and sub-variants we see in China. They're dealing with a VA.1.1 sub-variant spreading 13 plus thousand new infections daily. And we've talked about before that they went into total lockdown in China, much more stringently even here in the U.S.

and other places. The idea, like in New Zealand, zero COVID, zero COVID, we're going to lock down. We've since subsequently seen now over the last 28 months that lockdowns can slow and can reduce hospital admissions, which were really one of the main critical concerns. Would it slow infection rates? Yes, it seemed to, but most critically, the idea was to slow hospital admissions for serious disease or serious responses, particularly at that time when all of us were so naive, our immune systems were so naive to this SARS-CoV-2 virus. And then so the COVID-19 that resulted, the disease could get more serious and progress as the different variants came online, like Delta and so on. They're a little more virulent.

So what they're dealing with there is very naive population, very few vaccinations, and even turns out their vaccine candidates out of China may not be nearly as effective, efficacious as those from the U.S. and elsewhere. The BA.2 variant continues to spread in the United States and elsewhere, particularly UK and so on, it looks like, in parts of Hong Kong, but in the States and the UK and elsewhere that are heavily vaccinated and had experienced a lot of infection and continue to experience infection. You just don't see very serious disease so far coming out of it. You look at daily infection rates, the United States are still way below less than half what they were this time last year with everybody mixing and mingling en masse. So we can see some differences here when people are either, their immune systems are ready to go from prior infection and or from vaccines. So that's a little bit about what's going on.

The BA.2 looks to be very erratic and unpredictable. That's a variant more so than others, according to researchers. So, you know, we'll see what that turns out to mean. we'll see what that turns out to mean. In the meantime, looking at sort of vaccines, over 5.2 billion humans have now been vaccinated. Incredible. About a quarter of a billion Americans have now been vaccinated from the disease. They're still recommending they being legitimate medical authorities, independent panels, the Centers for Disease Control, medical authorities, independent panels, the Centers for Disease Control, FDA, and others to provide the best chance of not getting serious disease. There was really a series of studies that look interesting on the types of vaccines in emergency department or emergency room,

depending on who you are, what you call it, admissions from COVID-19, not just infected, but due to the COVID-19 disease infections. So, looking at, in descending order, three doses of the mRNA vaccines like Pfizer, for example, seem to reduce emergency room admissions by 83 percent, your probability of being admitted into emergency department. The J&J, single dose but with an mRNA booster, reduced your chances of emergency department admission by 79 percent. In other words, 80 percent roughly, about the same as three doses of the mRNA. If you had two doses of the J&J, your probability reduces it by 54%. You're starting to see a little bit of a drop there.

And then a single dose of J&J reducing your chances of emergency department admission by 24%. So just an interesting look. The idea of mixing and matching was something that was proposed, something the Army, those researchers had been looking at very early on. So, but it does seem that the best protocol right now, slightly better than J&J and mRNA booster would be the two doses of the mRNA, the Pfizer, for example, or the BioNTech, and then followed very closely by the J&J plus a booster from one of the mRNA. some new randomized controlled trial, double-blind studies showing a therapy. If somebody is now diagnosed with COVID, and somebody at the LPRC labs, one of our team just got diagnosed with COVID and is now dealing with that, some aches, pain so far, a little bit of brain fuzziness, but no real serious symptoms. And here we are. I've known about it, the infection,

for about four days. So, we're pretty seriously into it. I'm not sure I'm going to pronounce this, but it looks like Maldupiravir is this new therapy for COVID. It appears to eliminate all COVID symptoms within about three days. So, it looks to be highly effective antiviral therapy. So we talked about there are dozens and dozens of candidates, therapy candidates in different phase one, two, and three trials, as well as dozens and dozens more in preclinical development. And that goes with what we know about about 110 vaccine candidates, vaccines to boost our immune system and parents and reduce the chance we'll either be infected and or if the infection will be serious. A therapy is we've now been infected. How serious are the symptoms? Can we reduce the seriousness or even eliminate the virus from our bodies? And in this case, this this particular therapy candidate looked promising.

So we'll stay tuned on that. All right. Now, looking over to the LPRC, we know that the RELA event is coming up pretty shortly here. And in conjunction with that, the LPRC will be having an open house. And so if you're interested in coming in and visiting us and spending some time at the LPRC will be having an open house. And so if you're interested in coming in and visiting us and spending some time at the LPRC with our team and in our cutting edge five lab complex, love to have you reach out to operations at LPResearch.org, LPResearch.org. and so that's in conjunction again with the Retail Industry Leaders Association, RELA's annual asset protection conference coming up in Orlando this month in April. Come give us a look see. Some of the research that we're working on is an update and by the way we've been looking a lot at and doing research around as far far as looking at others' research and literature

review, facial recognition or feature matching. We know that models or algorithms can be developed with still photos, with video imagery that can help us recognize people like physicians can recognize a possible tumor or a retinal tear or a myriad of other things that are going on. In the same case, they can help us potentially recognize a human of interest, somebody that might be there to harm somebody or has harmed before and could do it again. So that feature matching or facial recognition type thing. So we'll be looking at that and doing some research. Dr. Corey Lowe, our senior research scientist here at the LPRC, as part of RELA and working in conjunction with the LP Foundation,

will be collecting data around that. So please come by the LPRC LPF booth while at RELA and see if we would love to collect some data, get your take, look at a few images, and so on. Help us with the genuine research effort. We're going to be combining the data we collect at this event with data we're collecting elsewhere to get an idea about model accuracy and how to improve that for place user safety so that those that are in these places and spaces might be less vulnerable if somebody's heading that way or entering that place. So please stand by. On the other front, Orion, one of our researchers here,

is continuing work and putting together the entire SOC lab and FusionNet program, the Security Operations Center lab, full-on command center. And we're going to be backed up by cloud, by on-prem or edge servers, as well as thin clients and working with myriad of detection tools, looking through out there in Zone 5, looking through the Internet, through blogs, social media, and other platforms that people communicate where they may be planning and threatening people in places, as well as mapping crime series, crime patterns, and so on. And so we've got an unbelievable lineup of participants, of partners that provide these types of technologies. And we're talking about the cutting-edge organizations that we'll release more later. If you're an LPAP partner that provides some type of solution that includes artificial intelligence of any form, natural language processing, it could be textual, of course, it could be still or moving imagery,

computer vision, then please reach out to us, whether you're already an LPRC member or not. And if you want to take part in our AI Solve program, part of LPRC Innovate, we've got a strong, strong and very rapidly growing lineup of solution partners in that realm. And again, we're working with almost 70 major retail corporations and all their divisions and chains. So there's a lot of beachfront property and opportunity to work with us and these retailers to help them get ahead of things, to better understand things. And so AI Solve is a key program for that. On the violence front, research well underway now on how to improve guards, guardianship by police protectors, whether it's off-duty police, proprietary guards, or third-party guards. How do we better and best dose what should people look like as far as uniforms and to portray capability? Where should they be placed?

What should they be doing? How should they interact, communicate, and do these things? These are all parts of this study. We're looking at some earlier indicators of active shooter, but how to pull together the active salience signals and signatures, the noise, whether it's digital or verbal or movement or questions or other behaviors. Earlier, how do you pull them together? They may be out there scattered all over, but if they're not pulled together witnessed or observed or collected by a single point or better done as well as in the moment some very interesting research getting ready to happen on that active assailant front on the aggressive street behavior particularly by those who happen to be homeless that research has been started as well. We've discussed that a little bit. So if you have interest in any of these types of projects, please get a hold of us at

operations at lpresearch.org. If you're an LPRC member or not, please let us know. We're doing a major project conducting one on supply chain. The current state of supply chains, every point and movement of merchandise, for example, coming out of the manufacturer all the way through a series of distribution centers through cross-talking or main distribution or direct store delivery or using dark stores and all these types of things. But what are the dynamics, both customer demand, other internal, external dynamics that might be indicating changes that are needed or taking place or will take place? So if you have interest in the current and future supply chains and ways to improve and enhance,

particularly protection of very valuable goods, highly stolen goods, for example. And then finally, a little bit around mapping. And again, this is a subset of all the projects we're working on, working on over 30 of them. But we're doing some mapping again on the active robbery series. We're doing mapping on shrinkage over time, you know, losses that are occurring in single or multiple chains. We're working on mapping organized retail crime groups, how they move, shoot, and communicate there. So now with three people on our team that are mappers and with ESRI and MapLarge and CapIndex and others that have a ton of mapping skills and technologies,

what's going to be coming out of the LPRC will be pretty incredible. Also, stay tuned to the media out there. The University of Florida's Explorer magazine coming out with a feature on the LPRC and UF Safer Places Lab. Also, Florida Trend magazine, which has long been for decades now the sort of political and business, primarily business power magazine in the state of Florida has just done a really nice major feature on, again, LPRC and on the Safer Places Lab. So the April edition of the Florida Trend magazine. Stay tuned on LPRC's website,

out on social media and so on to learn a lot more. But these articles are really doing a super job, these writers that put them together, of helping all of us, but helping those that don't work here at the LPRC better understand how we work, what we do, who some of our team members are, what we face, and so on. So they're well done, Florida Trend Magazine and UF Explorer Magazine, Well done, Florida Trend Magazine and UF Explorer Magazine, plus other sources. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, if you could take it away. Thank you, Reid. Let me start this week with a brand new study from the IHL Group on the state of the grocery sector in the United States,

one of the most important sectors in the United States. in the United States, one of the most important sectors in the United States. In fact, for the global top 250 retailers, as I reported in a previous podcast, this sector represents 66% of overall sales. So looking back, by the end of 2020, the food grocery sector had a monster year. How the industry got there is a bit out of the ordinary. The first two months of 2020 saw significant sales gains of 4.9% over 2019. Then COVID happened, panic set in,

and buyers drove a three to four week period where sales were up 80% to 500% in some product categories. By the time the dust settled, the segment as a whole had 11.5% growth in 2020 over 2019. 2021 opened strong and remained consistent and finished the year with a solid 5.7% growth without most of the drama of the previous year. Think back to all those runs on toilet paper, disinfecting wipes, and even frozen pizzas. Staffing did remain an issue in 2021, but not nearly as bad as for restaurants and hospitality providers. What is clear is that behavior has changed, and while there's no need to sound an alarm about the demise of stores, as 88% of food and grocery sales still have a store fulfillment component, there is a reason to set up and take notice that 27% of sales are now digitally mediated. And as a comparison, prior to the pandemic, that was only 3% to 4%.

So think about that. Digital now impacts 27% versus pre-pandemic, it was only 3% to 4%. Going forward, the study found that digital orders will continue to climb, but only as long as retailers address margin loss on these new services. Because retailers cannot sustain the 3% to8% loss they experience in margin on digital orders compared to customers walking in and picking up their own groceries. Going forward, retailers are expecting a significant 7.2% in sales for the entire year 2022. in sales for the entire year 2022. This figure reflects an ongoing opening up as society starts getting past COVID-19 and as variants wane, as well as soaring food prices,

with inflation being 7% in 2021, the highest in 40 years, and right now it doesn't show any signs of slowing down. The increases are expected also to continue for those digital customer journeys and they are sticking as consumers actually are getting accustomed to these non-traditional walk-in, in-store methods. This coupled with the labor shortage in the restaurant segments, which prevented the remaining restaurants to be able to match and demand people again out of the home, is a trend that continues to favor grocers. post-COVID-19, but the grocery retailers are also planning a store count increase considerably higher than other retail segments for 2022.

But their 4% increase in stores for 2022 is 35% lower than 2021, mainly because their new focus is remodeling their existing stores. The increase in digital journeys is leading a driver of store remodels, and grocery retailers expect to see a 5.1% in store remodels higher in 2021, 65% over other segments. More than most, these retailers realize that stores matter most. And for 2021, the respondents in the study said despite the growth of digital journeys, again, what I said earlier, 88% require the store to fulfill even those digital orders. This means that store formats and operations must change to efficiently support digital orders and walk-in orders. So you're going to hear a lot more about

ghost stores or dock stores or micro fulfillment centers which are a fulfillment operation in the same store for Trent. In terms of technology, more technology spend is being used to save labor. Since the start of the pandemic, an estimated 4 million workers who previously worked in retail and hospitality have moved to working in warehouses and delivery services. This has created a tremendous labor shortage that is not going away. hospitality and move to working in warehouses and delivery services. This has created a tremendous labor shortage that is not going away. This means that grocery are heavily invested in labor saving technology. In fact, the fastest growing grocers are increasing their investment in electronic shelf laborers by 843% over the next two years. And for self-checkout, the increase, again, is a dramatic 178% over the next two years.

Computer vision is another technology that is being deployed to several years within retailers. The most common application is an inventory accuracy, which I'll cover here in a few minutes. But technology is also being developed to speed up queues or lines, physical security and loss prevention, which is dear to this audience, a lot of this audience,

workforce identification and more. Bottom line, leaders continue to invest. Average retailers are showing a desire to catch up and invest more in technology. And below average retailers, especially when it comes to stores are falling further behind. Buy online, pick up in stores, and click and collect. So a massive 327% increase in share of retail revenues for grocers from 2020 to 2021. The share of local delivery increased 25% and ship from store increased 41%. Again, these need a lot more investment in technology to optimize as they did reduce margin. To

facilitate all these changes that have come been accelerated by the pandemic, our retailers are quickly investing edge architecture in their technology design. Edge provides more cost savings in relation to server consolidation, computing powers, manage and coordinate data from an IoT devices not used in store and operations.

Cameras, temperature and security centers, as well as S-control devices are managed at the edge before data is uploaded to the client. Edge also facilitates a simplified code for POS and mobile devices used by grocery retailers. by grocery retailers. Overall, the study showed a 1,350% growth in the next two years among grocery retailers for edge architecture, which can reduce operating costs and simplify maintenance. Related to this is a change in hardware architecture is the interoperability and data sharing among store apps with microservices architecture in application design, which are showing a 275% increase in the next 24 months. Winning retailers are also using microservices at a rate 200% higher than average retailers, allowing for more flexibility in their operation. Finally, to handle all that data in

increased land and when and the bandwidth that it causes, software defined WAN is growing 717% over the next two years, and the use of 5 gigs is expected to grow 42% by respondents in the next two years, and this is a jump from 0% in 2020. RFID and computer vision are both seeing dramatic increases in the next two years. RFID installs are expected to grow 375% and computer vision 600% over the same period. These technologies in and of themselves are not a complete solution for the grocery environment, but they can go a long way in increasing inventory counts or accuracy, which is a requirement for future success. The race to accurate inventory will determine who prospers and who does not in the next decade, because it is those retailers

that have accurate data that will be the ones to be best positioned to take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. These technologies are only as good as the data they are working with, so whoever has the best data will win the grocery race. I'm going to stop there this week and now turn it over to Tom. But before I do that, remember, speak to us here at LPRC about all engaging with these technologies because they're going to be more important,

not just in grocery, but all sector. Over to you, Tom. Well, thank you, Reid. Thank you, Tony. Always interesting and always informative. I wanted to start with kind of a little bit of different news. So for those of you that don't know, Microsoft Windows 11 has been released. It's been out for several months now. And there were some really interesting and exciting updates in the last week on some encryption capabilities that it's adding. So Microsoft Windows 11 is going to have a really,

really significant security update in the future, more protection both in the cloud and on the device. And really some of this will help stop some of these ransomware attacks and some of these zero-day vulnerabilities because of how it works. So a little bit interesting here. Normally, you would not say some of these things will help thaw off a zero-day vulnerability, but a lot of this has to do with attacking enhanced phishing methodology and encryption at a much greater detail, both on the device and in the cloud, and really communicating back and forth. So why will that help in some cases? Because although in the future, and this is all very

theoretical because this is new, the personal data encryption capability will be on par with what some enterprise pieces would be. So in some instances, if data is extracted from a computer, the data will be not useful so very interesting kind of an exciting time in the computer cyber security space because what we're seeing is we're seeing a big shift towards more preventative methodology that doesn't require other software and things of that nature so taking your data at its core and encrypting it and protecting it so that the data itself is protected is a really big win no one security vulnerabilities actors go after all the time and exploit one of the things that Windows is looking at is how do they take the approach of allowing third

party hardware and drivers in, but really, really limiting some of the potential vulnerabilities that are caused by them. There's a feature they're calling core isolation. And what that will do is it will actually allow your computer to block drivers, to block things that, well, before you'd get that little pop-up that says, yes, continue. This would actually not even allow someone to accidentally click yes and then install part of that smart app control piece that was released earlier.

It's blocking an app that may be unsafe, and it's really allowing you to take action right then and there. So as opposed to that yes-no message giving you a little bit different of an approach and more of an active monitoring. So I know as I, being an IT guy, talking about how that's exciting, it may not sound that exciting, but it's a really big win for all of us because the predominant user base is Windows-based today. I know that we have a lot of Mac folks out there as well, but this is really a big win in Microsoft. So switching gears kind of on some current news and breaches that have occurred. So the email marketing platform Mailchimp confirmed hackers used internal tools to steal data for over 100 clients.

Why is this interesting or concerning is because Mailchimp is a marketing tool. So that 100 clients could lead to millions of emails. It could even be more than that. It's kind of hard to tell. It could even be more than that. It's kind of hard to tell. So basically, the data was then used to phish attacks on users afterwards users for cryptocurrency wallet wallets so excuse me the what ends up happening is a lot of times you get a fake they they actually sent in this particular instance a fake data breach notification asking you to log back in and really took advantage of it so it's a combination of a phishing attack and a breach together.

So when we talked about kind of in past calls using the terminology cyber incidents versus breach and versus ransomware, the reason I feel so strongly about that is because they often start as one thing and mold into another. And we talked in the past about a ransomware event turning into a code extraction event where someone actually got someone's code. So maybe it started as ransomware, which then turned into what we would traditionally call a breach.

I think a lot of blurred lines here, and I think we're going to continue to see these type of attacks where people are taking advantage of one service to move to another one. And I think it's absolutely important that as we look at these things, we understand what the impact is for us as individuals when there's something that occurs. Another one is Block, formerly known as Square. So this is, if everybody knows, this is a payment platform and a formal employee.

So we talk about insider trading all the time. We talk about insider threats in the IT and business world and LPRC. We talk about internal theft and access and opportunity. Here's a good example of an insider actually taking advantage of something. A former employee downloading reports from the app after the employment ended. And then what that report had is username, addresses, full names, brokerage account numbers. Some included portfolio holdings and values. So Blocks has said it's about 8.2 current and former, 8.2 million current and former customers. And no usernames, passwords, or social security numbers were actually included. So this is name, account number, information.

So, again, thinking about the cyber incident here, this is an insider taking advantage of it. There's not really a clear understanding of what happened to that information, but it's important to kind of look at what that means when you're working with financial institutions and online banks. Block is a very reputable company. This could happen to anybody, but just what's the exposure? Do you use it? If anybody's listening today, you would have gotten a notification by now, but it's kind of one of those things that I think you have to keep time in mind as we continuously look at digitization. And that leads me back to before companies like Microsoft making announcements that they're really taking security encryption features. How best can you protect yourself in the event that you are a victim?

You know, we always say, and I'll say it repetitively, early and often patch, update your software early and often. It's the easiest, quickest way to stop some things that happens. Switching gears a little bit, just because I think we've been talking about the events in the Ukraine. The Ukraine is actually seeing Russian-based backfishing attacks. Armageddon is the name of the fishing attack and the group that's doing the phishing attack but this is continuing to we're continuing to see a rise on really this large magnitude of what we believe are russian-backed attacks certainly in ukraine but then globally as well and there is actually quite a bit of on the global circuit certainly united states bulletins out that there is a a major imminent. The problem with that is it's very hard. What does that mean? What does it mean a major attack imminent? Right now, we're looking at utilities and the potential for large financial institutions. So we'll continue to stay on that.

And then I think just because we talk about cybersecurity risk, for those of us on the podcast that are listening that use WhatsApp Messenger. So WhatsApp Messenger is owned by Facebook. It is the largest messaging platform in the world today. And it is globally accepted in not all countries, but most countries allow it. It offers end-to-end encryption. It's free of charge. It's actually a really great platform.

One of the things that we're seeing is phishing attacks or phishing attempts. So I refer to it as phishing, where they're voice driven. And what happens is there are voice messages that are going on to back to try to gather information. So there is some school of thought of voice messages are more secure or less secure. Some people think they're less secure. I use voice messages all the time. I find them much quicker, faster, and efficient. There's no concern of something lost in translation with a text message.

I use them on my iOS app. I also use them in WhatsApp pretty regularly on a daily basis. a daily basis. And what the phishing attack here is doing is it's actually sending an email to a user telling them that they have a new incoming voice message from WhatsApp. And the idea here is to get credentials that comes through. The WhatsApp notifying service is using an email address out of the Moscow region. That doesn't necessarily mean it's driven by there, but the email address is out of there. And the idea here is there's two kind of things that we're seeing is if you place the play button, you're redirected to a server that either wants to install a Trojan, so a malware. It's actually the cryptic version. And also is in some cases looking to get people to redirect and go into another website. The idea here for the listeners is that phishing and vishing and all of these type of attacks can be broached by many, many different ways.

And I actually did a presentation a couple of months back and got to be publishing an article very, very soon on trends and cyber and strategies around cybersecurity. You'll probably see it in one of the upcoming Los Angeles magazines. They're really breaking down that there is not just one type of phishing attack. There's all there's a myriad of different ones, and some of them are perpetrated actually by voice. perpetrated actually by voice. This is actually perpetrated by the subject of, hey, listen to this message. And when you click, you unfortunately get this crypto AKI Trojan that goes onto your computer. It's malicious software that is downloaded um good thing here is most and i want to say this definitively most modern um antivirus tools and anti-malware tools are going to detect this this type of attack but the the point here is that um if you did not if you did not have it

and it didn't attack it that you could actually execute this code and the malware is usually embedded in an html page and then on the other piece of it it is just a traditional kind of what i would say phishing attempt where you're getting this voice message you go in and it prompts you to log in we continue to see the the peppering of ransomware and phishing campaigns. And we see no end in sight. And I think one of the things to state is the more counter-cyber methods that we make, the more sophisticated some of these attacks are becoming. And I think it's great to see both a governmental backing of we need to address these by punishing the folks that do it, but also the IT companies really getting together and saying that we're going to work together to make sure that we do get a standardized approach to wherever we can to thrott off some of these attacks.

And then last but certainly not least but a little bit different type of news is if you're an internet person or a social media person, you probably heard that Elon Musk is the largest single shareholder of Twitter, which is a new thing. And he bought 9.2% of Twitter. It's roughly $2.9 billion, somewhere between $2.8 and $2.9 billion. But it's a passive stake in Twitter. So one of the things why I think that's important is the news. It's really like it has picked up on this and there's a lot of comments on Twitter. Twitter is actually my favorite platform for gathering open source intelligence and active intelligence because it's a real-time platform and a lot of news agencies and a lot of police departments, law enforcement agencies use it. But I digress back to what I was saying. So this $2.9 billion or 9.2 passive stake really means

that he is, while he may be the largest shareholder, he doesn't actually have an active role in the company. So it's considered a long-term investment. The Security and Exchange Commission filed this. He does not have a board seat. He does not have an active role in what occurs in the Twittersphere. So this is really more of a play to buy. It is an interesting note that not only is he the largest shareholder, but he's four times more shares than Jack Dorsey, who's the CEO of Twitter. So that's a really, for me, an interesting one. So Elon Musk has been a long supporter of Twitter and a user of Twitter. And whether you believe some of his tweets are controversial, he's really actually, along with some political minds, kept the platform very in the spotlight over the years.

So definitely, definitely something to watch. There was news that potentially Elon Musk would be joining the board of directors for Twitter. That would not make this a passive stake in Twitter. So I'm not sure how that works from the security exchanges commission standpoint. We'll have to keep an eye on that. That would be controversial. And right now. CNBC reported that he would be, he's actually approached being voted in, if you will, and he would be on until 2024. So that hasn't been kind of done, but there are two contradictory messages and this is all public. So this is all readily available for those of you that are interested in kind of the tech news piece um and then i think uh last but certainly not least we continue um to see you know uh unfortunately some of these

active shooter or mass shootings in the u.s i know that um we talk about the lprc and the fusion net i know there are fusion net calls happening, but I can't stress enough the importance to have an active intelligence, an open source intelligence gathering program. Why I use both of those together is because I think depending on when you started your program, you may call it a social media listening program or a social media monitoring platform.

Then it went to open source intelligence because social media is not the social media of the past, where in some cases it's the method that media or traditional media is using to distribute information. And then you now start to see the transition away from open source intelligence because it has a lot of different media, a lot of active intelligence gathering. So we continue to see these unfortunate events. And again, which leads me to Twitter. If you have a monitoring program that's able to consume the data and filter actively, it is a really great tool as not only sometimes an early indication of what's occurring, but an active listening model. So I know that we'll continue to talk about the Fusion

Net and how you as LPRC members, if you are a member, can get involved. If you are listening and you're not a member, reach out to anybody on the podcast or anybody at LPRC through LPResearch.org, and we can get that information to you. And with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Reid. All right. Well, thanks so much, Tony. Thanks so much, Tom, for all the great information, insights, tips, pointers, a great way to go through the week to hear and understand. And I want to thank Diego Rodriguez. But most of all, I want to thank you all out there for listening. We really do cherish each and every suggestion you might send our way. Refer others to the LPRC's

Crime Science Podcast. We're available on all the podcast platforms. It can always, again, be reached at operations at lpresearch.org. Everybody stay safe and stay connected. 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 Loss Prevention Research Council.