Author Archives: Justin Smulison

About Justin Smulison

Justin Smulison is the business content manager at RIMS and the host of RIMScast, the society's weekly podcast.
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TSA’s Anti-Terror Trackers Tested at Penn Station

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The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had a presence in New York’s Penn Station this week, as it partnered with Amtrak to test new security technology that can help prevent and detect risks of terrorism and violence.

The TSA set up a passive system known as a stand-off explosive detection unit at the Amtrak concourse to identify individuals carrying/wearing a person-borne improvised explosive device (PBIED), such as a suicide bomb or vest. Such a vest was worn by terror suspect Akayed Ullah, when he attempted to blow himself up in a tunnel connected to the Port Authority in Midtown Manhattan last December.

The system will be tested at Penn Station through the end of this week and operated by Amtrak police officers. TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein said that local enforcement agents can be trained on the technology and laptop in one day and that local police would establish protocol if a weapon were to be detected.

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According to TSA information, the unit’s main feature is a screening technology that can be used by Amtrak and mass transit agencies to detect potential threats—metallic or non-metallic—by identifying objects that block the naturally-occurring emissions emitted by a person’s body.

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The unit does not emit any radiation and no anatomical details of a person are displayed.

The use of the detection technology enables a rail or transit agency to help safeguard against terrorist threats in a mass transit environment.

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The TSA is supplying two models of the equipment for the purposes of the demonstration. One model is mounted on a tripod, the other is contained in a trunk.

The equipment is mobile, which allows agencies to easily relocate it to different stations. Users operate it via a laptop computer in the station. The image that appears on the laptop reveals concealed objects that block the body emissions and indicate the location and size of those objects on a green image of an individual.

Penn Station was the most recent stop in the new technology’s national testing tour. In December 2017, the scanners were used in the Los Angeles 7th Street metro station where more than 86,000 people pass through each weekday; one month earlier they were used by Amtrak in Washington, D.C. They were also used in Secaucus, New Jersey in 2014 as riders made their way to MetLife Stadium for Super Bowl XLVIII.

Amtrak Positive About Meeting PTC Deadline

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Earlier this month, Amtrak President Richard Anderson told the House railroads subcommittee that his company is on target to complete installation of positive train control (PTC) on the infrastructure it controls and on all of its equipment by the Dec. 31, 2018 federal deadline. He warned, however, that trains without PTC by the deadline could not use Amtrak’s tracks.

“We believe that PTC should ultimately be in place for all Amtrak routes and, as a matter of U.S. policy, PTC should be required for all passenger rail trips in America,” Anderson told the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials.

PTC is designed to eliminate human error by using four components: GPS satellite data, onboard locomotive equipment, the dispatching office and wayside interface units. The system communicates with the train’s onboard computer, allowing it to audibly warn the engineer and display the train’s safe braking distance based on its speed, length, width and weight, as well as the grade and curvature of the track, according to railroad operator Metrolink.

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If the engineer does not respond to the warning, the onboard computer will activate the brakes and safely stop the train.

Anderson’s testimony poses a challenge for major transportation providers like NJ Transit, whose trains run on the Northeast Corridor east of the Hudson River tunnels to New York City. Committee members have noted that NJ Transit “hasn’t even started” the process of installing PTC, while the company’s spokeswoman maintains that despite delays attributed to software compatibility, she believes they can meet the deadline. According to a Federal Railroad Administration progress report, 8% of NJ Transit’s locomotives and none of its tracks were updated with PTC as of the end of 2017.

After Congress passed the PTC Enforcement and Implementation Act of 2015 it also authorized the FAST Act, which allocated $199 million in PTC grant funding and specifically prioritized PTC installation projects for Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing funding. The Association of American Railroads estimates that freight railroads will spend $10.6 billion implementing PTC, with additional hundreds of millions each year to maintain. The American Public Transportation Association has estimated that the commuter and passenger railroads will have to spend nearly .

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6 billion on PTC.

“Without PTC, the system is too vulnerable to single points of failure, many of which are dependent upon the memory of a single human being interacting with a big, complicated system,” Anderson said. “When an engineer loses situational awareness or forgets a rule, we have no systems to assist them and help them prevent that error.”

He also noted that Amtrak is taking additional steps, such as installing inward-facing cameras. “These cameras monitor locomotive and engineer performance and are installed in Amtrak trains along routes in the northeast, midwest, and west and we are actively working to install them on Amtrak trains nationwide. Reviewing the data from these cameras, coupled with the data from our efficiency testing programs, provides us an excellent view of operational issues to be addressed in future training programs.”

Efforts to upgrade train technology has been a nationwide priority. The most recent major derailment occurred on Dec. 18, 2017 when an Amtrak train derailed near Tacoma, Washington, killing three passengers and injuring about 100. That crash was the result of excessive speed in a steep curve, which experts suggested could have been prevented with PTC’s automatic braking technology. Amtrak Train No. 501, on its inaugural run, was traveling 80 miles per hour in an area limited to 30 miles per hour when it derailed on an overpass, sending the train’s 12 coaches and one of its two engines careening onto the highway below.

As previously reported in Risk Management, a similar derailment in Philadelphia in May 2015 that killed eight, was also blamed on excessive speed and could have been avoided if PTC had been in place.

Thousands of U.S. Bridges Deemed Deficient

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More than 54,000 bridges along the Interstate Highway System in the United States were rated as “structurally deficient,” according to new analysis conducted by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s (ARTBA). This was just one of many of the concerning statistics detailed by ARTBA in its 2018 Deficient Bridge Report on Jan. 29.

Other critical details include:

  • The average age of a structurally deficient bridge is 67 years, compared to 40 years for non-deficient bridges.
  • Repair needs are identified among one in three U.S. bridges (226,837 total) and one in three bridges (17,726) along the Interstate Highway System (IHS).
  • There is the equivalent of one “structurally deficient” bridge for every 27 miles of the 48,000-mile IHS, which carries 75% of the nation’s heavy truck traffic.

The ARTBA report echoes the results of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card for 2017, wherein the U.S. received a performance of D+ based on the physical condition and needed investments for improvement. As reported by Risk Management magazine in 2017, the U.S. spends only 2.5% of its gross domestic product on infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that, over the next 10 years, the gap between planned investments in infrastructure and investment needs could exceed $2.1 trillion, with the largest investment gap in the transportation sector, followed by schools, electric utilities and water/wastewater systems.

With Americans crossing these deficient bridges 174 million times daily, there is reason for concern among private citizens and companies. At the current pace of repair or replacement, it would take 37 years to remedy all of them, said Alison Premo Black, PhD, ARTBA chief economist, who conducted ARTBA’s analysis.

“An infrastructure package aimed at modernizing the Interstate System would have both short- and long-term positive effects on the U.S. economy,” she said, noting that traffic bottlenecks cost the trucking industry more than $60 billion per year in lost productivity and fuel.

The report was issued just ahead of President Trump’s first State of the Union address on Jan. 30, in which he identified a struggling infrastructure and requested legislation aimed at capital improvements:

Tonight, I am calling on the Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment we need. Every federal dollar should be leveraged by partnering with state and local governments and, where appropriate, tapping into private sector investment—to permanently fix the infrastructure deficit.

Any bill must also streamline the permitting and approval process—getting it down to no more than two years, and perhaps even one.

National Public Radio reported that the White House initially called for a $1 trillion rebuilding plan but raised the stakes during the address, and specifically called out certain phrasing.

“That word ‘generates’ is important,” wrote NPR contributors in an analysis of the speech, “because this would not mean the U.S. government is spending $1 trillion.” President Trump has allocated $200 billion in federal spending on infrastructure. “The bulk of the $200 billion would go toward leveraging state and local money and private investment,” NPR’s David Schaper reported.

Love and Cybersecurity: Q&A with eHarmony’s Ronald Sarian

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Now through Feb. 14 is the busy season for the online dating and matchmaking industry. Heavier traffic can present risks to these sites, demanding added precautions. Ronald Sarian, vice president and general counsel (and default risk manager) at eHarmony spoke to Risk Management Monitor about the types of risks he faces—particularly regarding data and cybersecurity—and how he protects the “#1 trusted dating site for like-minded singles,” where “Every day, an average of 438 singles marry a match they found on eHarmony.” (For those familiar with its commercials, the song now stuck in your head can be played in a new tab here—don’t fight it.)

Risk Management Monitor: You joined eHarmony following a data breach in 2012 in which 1.5 million users’ passwords were compromised. What steps did you take to prevent a recurrence?

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Ronald Sarian: Following that breach, we put everything we did under a microscope and brought in Stroz Friedberg to aid our investigation and help improve our processes. We ultimately decided to migrate all credit card data off-site to CyberSource, a third-party vendor. When we need to charge a credit card we get the key from the vendor and then return it when we’re done. We wrote transmission gateways out of all of our internal apps so things aren’t communicating with each other so easily. This way, if there is an attack, it will be “quarantined.” We also employed extensive layering for the same purpose.

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We put a much more sophisticated logging system in place, hired a full-time security engineer, and started performing more firewall audits and regular white hat hacks to try to detect vulnerabilities. And we improved our on-boarding and off-boarding for employees.

RMM: What are the prevalent risks you face leading up to Valentine’s Day and how do you mitigate them?

RS: We face risks all year long, but this time of year there are just more of them. There are always fraud issues we deal with and people try to launch bot attacks to take down our systems and cause us grief. We believe we utilize industry best practices for all these issues. For example, to try to prevent fraudsters from getting into the system we have sophisticated business rules that look at keywords or phrases used when filling out the intake questionnaire—certain words or phrases indicate the probability of a fraudster. Misuse of the English language can sometimes signal a problem. These raise red flags in our system.

Our questionnaire is quite elaborate and evaluates psychological factors in order to determine personality traits. We have essentially 29 different dimensions of compatibility we look at and try to glean all these dimensions so we can match you with someone who is typically 80% or higher in each. If you answer the questions in a certain manner for most of the questionnaire and we see a major inconsistency toward the end, for example, that can indicate something is fishy.

We also look at suspicious IP addresses. We utilize these practices all year round but scrutiny is heightened at this time of year and especially when we have free communication weekends. We’re pretty good at sorting these people out before they can communicate. Our system has been developed over 17 years and is constantly being improved as threats change and fraudsters become more sophisticated.

RMM: How else is risk management used in eHarmony’s strategies and operations?

RS: A goal of mine is to adapt the ISO 27001 ERM framework for eHarmony. I believe we have the best practices in place to achieve that when the time and finances are right. It’s quite a bit of work to get the certification and I don’t know if that would happen this year but it’s something I want to do because I think it would be great for us. It basically requires a holistic, top-down look at your entire operation.

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This is not only from a tech standpoint but from a personnel standpoint as well.

Many breaches start internally, most of the time unintentionally, so people should, for example, know not to click on a link in an email from an unknown source. You also need to assure your vendors are utilizing the appropriate safeguards and you must have a security incident management plan in place. There are many other requirements, of course. I believe we essentially have the information security management system (ISMS) envisioned by ISO 27001 in operation right now. We just need to make it official.