The Mike Hosking Breakfast

The Justice Department has recovered most of a multimillion-dollar ransom payment made to hackers after a cyberattack that caused the operator of the nation's largest fuel pipeline to halt its operations last month, officials said Monday.
The operation to seize cryptocurrency paid to the Russia-based hacker group is the first of its kind to be undertaken by a specialized ransomware task force created by the Biden administration Justice Department. It reflects a rare victory in the fight against ransomware as U.S. officials scramble to confront a rapidly accelerating threat targeting critical industries around the world.
"By going after the entire ecosystem that fuels ransomware and digital extortion attacks — including criminal proceeds in the form of digital currency — we will continue to use all of our resources to increase the cost and consequences of ransomware and other cyber-based attacks," Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at a news conference announcing the operation.
Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline, which supplies roughly half the fuel consumed on the East Coast, temporarily shut down its operations on May 7 after a gang of cybercriminals using the DarkSide ransomware variant broke into the company's computer system. The ransomware variant used by DarkSide, which has been the subject of an FBI investigation since last year, is one of more than 100 that law enforcement officials are now scrutinizing, said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate.
Colonial officials have said they took their pipeline system offline before the attack could spread to its operating system, and decided soon after to pay ransom of 75 bitcoin — then valued at roughly $4.4 million — in hopes of bringing itself back online as soon as it could. The company's president and chief executive, Joseph Blount, is set to testify before congressional panels this week.
In a statement Monday, Blount said he was grateful for the FBI's efforts and said holding hackers accountable and disrupting their activities "is the best way to deter and defend against future attacks of this nature.
"The private sector also has an equally important role to play and we must continue to take cyber threats seriously and invest accordingly to harden our defences," he added.
Cryptocurrency is favoured by cybercriminals because it enables direct online payments regardless of geographical location, but in this case, the FBI was able to identify a virtual currency wallet used by the hackers and recovered the proceeds from there, said the FBI's Abbate. The Justice Department did not provide details about how the FBI had obtained a "key" for the specific bitcoin address, but said law enforcement had been able to track multiple transfers of the cryptocurrency.
"For financially motivated cyber criminals, especially those presumably located overseas, cutting off access to revenue is one of the most impactful consequences we can impose," Abbate said.
Though the FBI generally discourages the payment of ransom, fearing it could encourage additional hacks, Monaco said one takeaway for the private sector is that if companies come quickly to law enforcement after ransomware incidents, officials may be able to again help recover funds — though that is not guaranteed.
The Bitcoin amount seized — 63.7, currently valued at $2.3 million after the price of Bitcoin tumbled— amounted to 85% of the total ransom paid, which is the exact amount that the cryptocurrency-tracking firm Elliptic says it believes was the take of the affiliate who carried out the attack. The ransomware software provider, DarkSide, would have gotten the other 15%.
"The extortionists will never see this money," said Stephanie Hinds, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, where a judge earlier Monday authorized the seizure warrant.
Ransomware attacks — in which hackers encrypt a victim organization's data and demand a hefty sum for...

Issues in the nursing profession are thought to be feeding on each other.
About 30-thousand Nursing Organisation members around the country will be on strike for eight hours today.
MedWorld managing director Dr Sam Hazledine told Mike Hosking nursing is a challenging profession, and the staff shortage shows we're not paying them enough.
He says many senior nurses are also leaving the profession because they've had enough.
“And this leaves a lot of young, junior nurses undertrained I guess, in their area. Which makes the problem more of an issue when you don’t have those senior people around.”
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There are calls for an urgent review of retirement village legislation.
Retirement Commissioner Jane Wrightson has released a report recommending an in depth assessment of the sector's legal framework.
The report suggests the rules unfairly favour operators over customers, and finds flaws in the current complaints system. 
It takes into account more than three-thousand submissions, most of which are from retirement village residents.
Wrightson says it's more than just a few isolated incidents.
“It’s a systemic problem. The village sector comprises everything from very large companies, ranging to smaller non-profits.”
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Is too much freedom of speech a bad thing?
For some countries, apparently yes.
A Danish think tank has conducted a 50 thousand person, 33 country survey into the idea of free speech.
It found that, while the Western world generally agrees it's a universal good, there were a number of countries where citizens think there is too much liberty to give offence.
This was most prevalent in places like Kenya and Nigeria where they have conflict around religion and sects, with 82% of respondents from Kenya saying the government should be able to prevent people from saying something to offend minorities.
But some other countries without those major issues also registered as having too much freedom of speech by their own citizens such as Germany, France, Australia, Argentina and Britain.
A man who has spent decades researching aspects of free speech is Massey University sociologist Paul Spoonley who told Mike Hosking the pandemic may have affected some Western attitudes to free speech.
“Covid-19 has caused a little bit of concern about free speech… it looks to be that there’s concerns about misinformation, that people are opposed to vaccines and so on.”
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An international security expert has explained why criminals fell for an app which was central to the world's largest organised crime takedown.
The global police sting - involving 16 countries - has resulted in the arrest of senior gang members in New Zealand, Australia and other countries.
More than 900 charges have been laid here against 35 people.
The operation used a messaging app set up by the FBI, which was then unwittingly used by criminal organisations. 
Security expert Yan St Pierre told Mike Hosking the FBI took down an earlier communication enterprise, creating an almost exclusive need for an alternative.
“By creating this need, by shutting out any other competitors, they basically ensured that they could have the market.”
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National is promising to improve its candidate selection process following the Jake Bezzant scandal.
Bezzant, who unsuccessfully stood in the Upper Harbour seat last election, has been accused of impersonating his ex-partner online and sharing naked pictures of her.
Leader Judith Collins maintains she didn't know about the allegations against Bezzant,  until they were made public.
But she told Mike Hosking  the party will be introducing extra checks, to ensure it selects the best possible candidates in future.
“Most of our candidates are perfectly fine, no problem at all with them. So, it’s very important that we have people looking through the social media and so its clear that’s going to be some of the work that’s going on.”
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As mentioned Friday, I have been following the AMC saga.
It’s not just AMC, it’s all sorts of stocks and they’re being driven by greed and stupidity, not necessarily in that order.
AMC is the world’s largest movie operator.
They started out as the Dubinsky brothers in 1920 in Kansas.
They eventually became American Royal Cinemas and then American Multi Cinemas, or AMC.
They have almost 1000 theatres and 11000 screens; they bring in over half a billion in revenue a year, well that was until Covid.
Of late, they have been caught up in the mad frenzy of social media hype, tweeting, shorting and general mayhem around the value of their stock.
Now (as was explained by Andrew Friday), none of the old fashioned stuff around the state of their business has anything to do with this trading.
The fact they haven’t been open, the fact they didn’t really know who would come back to the movies post-Covid.
The fact Hollywood wasn’t making a lot of content to show, even if they were open, wasn’t a part of the trading equation.
And this, in a way, is why the world gets itself in the mess it does financially.
And its why, no matter what happens, when they say that’s a lesson learned, or that will never happen again, it’s simply not true.
I suppose the upside of what we have seen is it isn’t illegal, just insane.
The movie when they make it, and they will, will not be like ‘The Big Short’ but it’s the same ingredients; greed, greed and greed.
They’ve managed to go out into the world and say to various lenders ‘Hey look at our stock, look at our value’ and based on that they’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
The lesson here, I think, is no matter what is happening in the world, people are desperate for a punt, for wealth, for risk.
Common sense is out the door, dollar signs are in the eyes.
It’s why we love lotto, no one wants to do the homework, or be knowledgeable, it’s why Vegas is popular.
They like a bandwagon, they like a thrill and they’re happy to toss money at it.
Crypto is the same, what might have been once an alternative is now just a feeding frenzy driven by Elon Musk tweets.
He’s the snake oil salesman of the 21st century. Do what Elon says, even though Elon is nuts.
The human condition is an amazing thing, the more we are supposed to know, the less we learn.

A stoush has emerged between elite athletes and the governing body for sport in this country over transgender athletes competing against other women.
Sport NZ put out a draft document that they see as a rough set of guidelines as to how to allow transgender women to compete against other women in various sports.
Now, a group of 41 ex-athletes, including Olympic medalists Danyon Loader and Barbara Kendall and former All Black Jeff Wilson have written to Robertson and Ardern asking them to intervene, calling for better consultation.
So how does Sport NZ respond to their work? Sport NZ chief executive Raelene Castle told Mike Hosking their focus is on community sport and any international issues will be decided by international governing bodies.
“These guiding principles are about participation sport, so community sport and trying to fidn a palce that's safe and fair and inclusive."
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There is a warning for parents around the world; vegan diets for infants are dangerous.
A new study by the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in the UK and the Children's Memorial Health Institute in Poland compared infants on a vegan diets and those who were omnivores.
It found that vegan kids might have slightly lower levels of cholesterol and body fat, but on average they were three centimetres shorter, had weaker bones and were three times more likely to be B12 deficient.
One of the co-authors of the study is professor Jonathan Wells who told Mike Hosking each diet comes with health risk and reward.
“Whatever you eat there some benefits and there are some risks and those benefits and risks aren’t just manifesting now, they’re distributed over the life course.”
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Apparently, we aren't doing enough for employee wellbeing in this country.
In a New Zealand first Skills Consulting Group Work Wellbeing Index, 1500 workers were surveyed.
The survey found that the average wellbeing score was 62 out of 100.
And for those workplaces giving free fruit or pizza or yoga classes you've been found out - those are seen as hollow gestures to tick a box and say "look at me, we're doing our part".
Leading this Wellbeing Index is the general manager of Wellbeing at Skills Consulting Group Jane Kennelly who told Mike Hosking the line between work and life has become blurred.
“People turn up for eight hours a day, and to expect them to leave everything at the door is now considered an old fashioned notion.”
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