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Phone numbers, personal information for 533 million Facebook users exposed online, report says

InternationalApr 05. 2021

By The Washington Post · Hannah Knowles

Personal information on more than 500 million Facebook users – previously leaked and now made more widely available – was shared online Saturday, according to the news site Insider, worrying experts who said the compromised data could make people more vulnerable to fraud.

Insider said it reviewed a sample of the leaked phone numbers, birth dates, biographical details and more and found that some data matched known Facebook users’ records. The Washington Post has not independently verified the information. Facebook said the leak involved “old” data stemming from a problem resolved in 2019, but the news still sparked renewed scrutiny of a social media giant previously dogged by high-profile concerns about data privacy.

“Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing,” tweeted Alon Gal, the co-founder of an Israeli cybercrime intelligence company called Hudson Rock, who flagged the release of the Facebook data Saturday. Social engineering involves getting access to people’s confidential information by gaining their trust rather than overcoming technical barriers – for example, by impersonating a tech support person.

“I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data,” Gal tweeted. Gal said the compromised data also included Facebook IDs, full names, locations, some email addresses, relationship statuses and other details.

Facebook did not immediately respond to questions Saturday evening, but company spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois tweeted Saturday that the leak detailed by Insider involved “old data that was previously reported on in 2019.”

“We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” Bourgeouis wrote.

Insider said a Facebook spokesperson told the news organization that the data was scraped through a now-fixed vulnerability.

The breach affected more than 533 million users spanning 106 countries, according to Insider, and includes more than 32 million records for users in the United States.

Gal told The Washington Post that the leaked database was previously sold for tens of thousands of dollars and then circulated, selling for lower prices until it finally was offered at no charge.

Early this year, Gal said, someone built a bot that gave people access to the database for a fee – a development that made the trove of data “much more worrisome,” Gal tweeted at the time. Motherboard reported in January on that peddling of access in a “low-level cybercriminal forum.”

On Saturday a user posted on a forum offering the data free.

The Post messaged the user on the app Telegram and did not immediately hear back.

Facebook – the world’s most popular social media site, with well over 2 billion users – has drawn rebukes before for its handling of people’s data. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5 billion, alleging that it misled users about how third parties such as advertisers were accessing their personal information. Facebook did not have to admit guilt, but its settlement with the government included what was the largest privacy violation fine in American history.

The FTC began investigating after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a firm that worked with the campaign of former president Donald Trump, had improperly accessed names, “likes” and other information for millions of users without their knowledge.

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Johnson & Johnson says it will take full control of its coronavirus vaccine production at Baltimore plant

InternationalApr 05. 2021

By The Washington Post · Jon Swaine

Johnson & Johnson will take full control of the production of its coronavirus vaccine at a troubled plant in Baltimore where millions of doses worth of drugs were contaminated, the company said late Saturday.

Production at the plant of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca will be relocated with help from the Biden administration following the mix-up, according to AstraZeneca and a seniorfederal health official.

The developments followed the news that a batch amounting to 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was spoiled at the plant after being contaminated with ingredients for AstraZeneca’s vaccine.

The error was caught and no contaminated drugs made it out of the plant, according to the companies involved.

The plant is operated by Emergent BioSolutions, a major government contractor. The senior health official said the administration had determined that only one vaccine should be made at the facility.

Johnson & Johnson said in a statement that it was “assuming full responsibility” of production of its vaccine at the plant and that it was sending additional staff to Baltimore to oversee production.

“Specifically, the company is adding dedicated leaders for operations and quality, and significantly increasing the number of manufacturing, quality and technical operations personnel to work with the company specialists already at Emergent,” the statement said.

AstraZeneca said in a statement that it was working with the government to find an alternative location for production of its vaccine, which has not yet been authorized by U.S. authorities.

“AstraZeneca and the U.S. government continue to work closely together to support agreed upon plans for the development, production and full delivery of the vaccine,” the statement said.

Johnson & Johnson said that it still expected to deliver 100 million doses of its single-shot vaccine to the U.S. government by the end of May. President Biden has pledged that all American adults will be eligible for vaccination by that time.

Emergent spokeswoman Nina DeLorenzo confirmed Saturday that the company had been notified that production of the AstraZeneca vaccine would be relocated and that Emergent intended to stop making the vaccine in the next few days.

“We are welcoming additional Johnson & Johnson personnel on-site at Bayview for their technical expertise and support,” DeLorenzo said.

The changes in vaccine production at the plant were first reported Saturday by the New York Times.

Emergent’s coronavirus vaccine production line has not yet been certified by the Food and Drug Administration. Until it is certified, vaccines made there cannot be distributed to consumers. Drugs made at the Baltimore plant have been set aside while the FDA reviews the Emergent plant.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that an FDA investigator flagged problems at the Baltimore facility six weeks before the Trump administration announced a $628 million deal with Emergent as part of Operation Warp Speed, the government’s program to rapidly produce vaccines to fight the novel coronavirus.

Emergent secured deals totaling more than $740 million with Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca to produce vaccines for both companies at the Baltimore site.

The Post reported last year that Emergent had benefited from billions of dollars in federal contracts as health officials directed public spending toward the threat of bioterrorism attacks at the expense of some preparations for a pandemic.

Emergent’s Warp Speed deal was made as part of a long-standing contract between the company and the office in the Department for Health and Human Services responsible for preparing for public health threats.

At the time of the award, that office was led by Assistant Secretary Robert Kadlec. The Post previously reported that before joining the Trump administration, Kadlec was paid as a consultant to Emergent and formed a startup company with Emergent’s chairman. Kadlec did not mention either role in a questionnaire about his career that he completed for the Senate when it considered his nomination by Donald Trump in 2017. Kadlec and Emergent previously told The Post that Kadlec’s past work for Emergent had no bearing on the firm’s government contracts.

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How the Ever Given was freed from the Suez Canal

InternationalApr 04. 2021

By Atthar Mirza, Júlia Ledur, Ruby Mellen
The Washington Post

The crisis in the Suez Canal last month turned the world’s attention on a single challenge few had ever considered: how to refloat a 200,000-ton mass of steel, as long as the Empire State Building is high.

Digging, tugging and pulling, it turned out, freed the ship. The days-long, round-the-clock effort to move the massive vessel involved sucking sand and mud from underneath its hull, as tugboats pushed and pulled the ship in confluence with a swelling tide.

Here’s how it happened.

The Ever Given container ship became stuck at an angle in the Suez Canal during a sandstorm on March 23, blocking for six days a vital waterway through which about 15 percent of all shipping passes.

Using satellite imagery and vessel data, The Post reconstructed the operation that released the ship

The canal narrows below the shoreline, which meant the ship was much more stuck than it appeared to be in photos. Riprap, or loosely placed stones, lines the banks, which made it even harder to dislodge the ship.

A fleet of tugboats, dredgers and salvage crews worked for several days to refloat the ship. On Monday morning, they managed to free the stern, the back of the vessel, the most visible sign of progress since the blockage.

After a morning boost from a high tide reaching nearly seven feet, a new attempt to release the Ever Given began Monday afternoon.

The Ever Given was fully dislodged on Monday at 3:05 p.m. local time.

The Ever Given got stuck the morning of March 23, amid poor visibility and high winds in one of the narrower parts of the 120-mile canal. Egyptian officials have launched an investigation into the details of the crash.

“When you’re traveling on a boat and you hit something, there’s a tremendous sense of loss,” said Gregory Tylawsky, a licensed shipmaster and founder of the Maritime Expert Group.

Early in the crisis, experts were unsure how they would be able to move the ship. “It is not really possible to pull it loose,” said Peter Berdowski, the CEO of Dutch dredging company Boskalis, which helped with the week’s efforts.

The vessel, he said, was like “an enormous beached whale.”

The canal is dug in sand and mud, meaning a boat hitting the edge would get “stuck in the sand rather than [getting] repelled by a hard wall,” said Ragui Assaad, a professor at the University of Minnesota and research fellow at the Economic Research Forum in Cairo.

There is little room for error. “As a pilot, you cannot deviate from that center line,” Tylawsky said.

Within hours of the blockage, tugboats were on the scene, followed by dredgers, working through the week to free the Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated ship.

– – –

Each hour the Ever Given remained stuck on a muddy bank of the Suez Canal meant worse disruptions to international commerce. A substantial share of all shipping passes through the waterway. In the face of delays, the prices of oil and coffee began to rise, and livestock faced starvation aboard some of the hundreds vessels left waiting indefinitely.

With a ship that size already caught in the canal’s bank, there wouldn’t be much for the operators to do.

“It’d be controlled chaos onboard,” said Gary Cordes, a retired shipmaster and senior adviser at the Maritime Expert Group, who said he transited the canal nine times between the 1960s and 1980s. He said it would fall on those familiar with the landscape to come up with a plan to free the ship.

Authorities worked day and night, dredging and using tugboats to dig and pull the ship away from the banks. Salvagers dredged underneath and around the hull, pumping sediment from the bottom of the canal.

The dredgers on scene were heavy-duty. The 10th of Ramadan came to help, as did the Dutch-made Mashhour, owned and operated by the Suez Canal Authority, which was touted by the Transportation Research Board in 1996 as the “world’s largest and most powerful stationary cutter suction dredger,” capable of sucking up “abrasive sand with gravel, compacted sand, sticky clay and rocks.”

Often more than 10 tugboats were also leading the effort, pushing and pulling the ship in an effort to dislodge it from the bank.

Loaders excavated the eastern embankment at the ship’s bow. Over the weekend, those efforts removed nearly 1 million cubic feet of mud and water, officials said.

In an added effort to refloat the ship, some 9,000 tons of the Ever Given’s ballast water – used to stabilize the ship – were released to help lighten the vessel, officials said.

– – –

While efforts throughout the week proved unsuccessful, the weekend bore promises of shifting tides. A full moon on Sunday night meant unusually high waters that could help refloat the ship. And more help was on the way: two big and powerful tugboats, the Dutch-flagged Alp Guard and the Italian-flagged Carlo Magno.

Through Sunday night into Monday afternoon, teams worked tirelessly to get enough of the sand and mud out from under the boat that it would rejoin the canal’s waters, staving off a catastrophe for global trade.

On Monday afternoon around 3 p.m., the Ever Given broke free, its leviathan haul slowly creeping north to the Great Bitter Lake.

“I think they did a spectacular job,” said Cordes, acknowledging he initially thought the effort would maybe take “a couple of weeks.”

The mood on the scene in the Suez Canal was ebullient, as workers cheered and vessels honked. But the ripples of the Ever Given’s release were felt around the globe.

“To do that is one thing but to do it in front of the world, with the world watching, it was massive,” Tylawsky said.

– – –

About this report: Sources: VesselFinder, Suez Canal Authority, Leth Agencies. Satellite image 2021 Maxar Technologies. The 3-D models of the Suez Canal were built based on measurements from the engineering department of the Suez Canal Authority. The positions of the Ever Given container ship and the tugboats are based on satellite imagery by Maxar, Airbus Space and Planet Labs Inc., as well as location data from VesselFinder. The dredger position is an approximation based on satellite images of the scene.

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Cairo’s mummies get a new home and a grand procession on the way.

InternationalApr 04. 2021

By Sudarsan Raghavan
The Washington Post

CAIRO – It was a parade unlike any other this city has seen.

A procession of 22 ancient Egyptian royal mummies streamed Saturday from downtown Cairo, where revolutionaries rose up to topple autocrat Hosni Mubarak a decade ago, to a new museum three miles away that represents Egypt’s future as much as its past.

At 8 p.m., the mummies – 18 kings and four queens – left the famed ochre-hued Egyptian Museum near Tahrir Square, where they had rested for decades. They were each atop specially decorated gold-and-blue-hued vehicles, resembling a boat. Or perhaps the symbol of a winged sun, an ornament worn by Egypt’s ancient rulers and seen as providing protection. Each of the 22 vehicles was emblazoned with the name of the royals mummy it carried.

The multimillion-dollar affair – called the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade – had been promoted for months. Egyptian authorities are seeking to attract tourists, a key source of foreign currency, and alter the course of an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic, Islamist attacks and political chaos in past years.

The highly choreographed ceremony was also a nationalist vehicle to highlight Egypt’s place in history. The nation’s authoritarian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, who himself is often referred to as “a new pharaoh” for his ambitious projects and iron-fisted rule, presided over the ceremony.

In a Facebook post, Intisar al-Sissi, Egypt’s first lady, said Saturday’s event “expresses the greatness of the ancient civilization that provided humanity, and still does, with a unique and diverse legacy, contributing to its progress and prosperity.”

Most Egyptians saw the parade on television with the entire route and surrounding bridges and roads closed for security. With parts of the program prerecorded, viewers were treated to an orchestra and singer playing patriotic music and videos extolling many of the country’s famous temples, churches and mosques.

Sissi, along with senior officials and aides, watched the parade on a giant screen inside a hall of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, where the mummies would be displayed.

The ceremony sought to recreate the ancient existences of the royals. In the procession were horse-drawn chariots and hundreds of performers wearing the traditional attire worn by ancient Egyptians.

The vehicles circled around Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt’s revolution, which is now centered with an ancient obelisk and statues of lions. Flood lights bore into the night sky as yellow and blue lights lit up the area.

The mummies carried in boxes filled with nitrogen and their vehicles were fitted with special shock-absorbers to protect their millennia-old remains. Nothing was taken to chance: even their route was freshly paved.

The mummies in the procession were lined up in chronological order. The oldest rulers came first, starting with Seqenenre Taa, the last king of the 17th Dynasty, who reigned in the 16th century B.C. The last was the 12th century B.C.. pharaoh Ramses IX.

In between were two of the most well-known of ancient Egypt’s rulers: Ramses II, widely seen as the greatest pharaoh of the New Kingdom period, and Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled at a time when women pharaohs were very rare. The temples of both rulers, in Luxor and Abu Simbel, are among the most visited.

At 8:30 p.m., after following a large motorcycle escort through the empty Cairo streets, the 22 vehicles stopped in front the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in the capital’s Fustat enclave. Then, a 21-gun salute followed. Minutes later the parade entered the compound and Sissi walked out to greet the new arrivals.

They will be housed in the museum’s royal hall of mummies and will go on display by mid-month, said officials.

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Amazon admits it was wrong to suggest its workforce never needs to pee in bottles on the job

InternationalApr 04. 2021

Last week, in an unusually combative tweet-response to a congressman, Amazon insisted that its workers did not urinate in bottles.

“If that were true, nobody would work for us,” wrote the e-commerce giant that employs more than a million people worldwide. Disbelief, derision and fact-checking ensued as journalists weighed in with reported memos and contractor policies suggesting otherwise: “Documents show Amazon is aware drivers pee in bottles and even defecate en route,” the Intercept reported, citing workers who described intense pressure to hit their quotas.

Now Amazon says it was wrong.

“[We] know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed,” the retail giant wrote in a Friday blog post, apologizing to Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., for its “incorrect” response to him.

“This is a long-standing, industry-wide issue and is not specific to Amazon,” the company said, including links to various news stories. “Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it. We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions.”

The company’s mea culpa came as several thousand Amazon employees in an Alabama warehouse vote on whether to unionize – a local referendum with national implications as advocates see a spark for broader changes and as President Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., back workers’ right to organize. Amazon has fought unionization aggressively, fueling long-standing criticisms that it mistreats workers even as the retail giant touts its $15 minimum wage.

Pocan rebuffed Amazon’s apology on Saturday, tweeting that it is “not about me” but about Amazon’s workers “who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity.”

“Start by acknowledging the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for ALL your workers, then fix that for everyone & finally, let them unionize without interference,” Pocan wrote.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for further comment Saturday. Amazonchief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

The Twitter-fight began on March 24 after Pocan tweeted a critical response to Amazon executive Dave Clark, who suggested his company shared common ground with their strident critic Sanders – while also taking a jab at Sanders and other progressive politicians’ struggle to pass national reforms such as a $15 minimum wage.

“I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace,” Clark said.

Pocan, who bills himself as a “small business owner, union member, and lifelong advocate for progressive causes,” objected.

“Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a “progressive workplace” when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” he tweeted.

That drew an eye-catching and soon-to-go-viral response from Amazon News that began, “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?”

On March 25, Amazon also tweeted a combative response to another high-profile critic, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who had accused large companies such as Amazon of exploiting tax “loopholes.”

“You make the tax laws @SenWarren; we just follow them,” Amazon News wrote.

Online, people swiftly cited reporting that some people felt compelled to pee in bottles on the job. The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein reported that Amazon’s tweet to Pocan raised eyebrows among staffers, too, with one security engineer suggesting the company’s account may have been hacked.

“These tweets are unnecessarily antagonistic (risking Amazon’s brand), and may be a result of unauthorized access by someone with access to the account’s credentials,” the engineer’s report read, according to the Intercept.

Nine days after its tweet to Pocan, Amazon backed off.

“This was an own-goal, we’re unhappy about it,” the company said in its blog post, using a soccer term for the unfortunate moment when someone scores on their own team.

That tweet “did not receive proper scrutiny,” the company said, and “did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers.”

“A typical Amazon fulfillment center has dozens of restrooms, and employees are able to step away from their work station at any time,” the statement continued. “If any employee in a fulfillment center has a different experience, we encourage them to speak to their manager and we’ll work to fix it.”

Reporting over the years has said that both Amazon warehouse workers and contract drivers sometimes urinate in bottles to minimize their time off-task.

“I saw no effort on Amazon’s part to push delivery service providers to allow their drivers to use the restroom on a normal human basis, leading many, myself included, to urinate inside bottles for fear of slowing down our delivery rates,” former driver James Meyers recently told the Guardian, describing shifts that could stretch 14 hours.

Last fall, Amazon said it had 1,700 delivery-service partners in the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. More than 400,000 drivers deliver goods for Amazon, all either self-employed or working for other companies even if they wear Amazon uniforms and drive trucks with its branding.

– – –

The Washington Post’s Hamza Shaban and Jay Greene contributed to this report.