From Fire Victims To Supply Chains, Trulioo Finds New Uses For KYC

Tom Groenfeldt , Contributor I write about finance and technology. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

It’s forest fire season in California and that means Trulioo, a global identity verification company, could be called on to verify the identity of people who have lost their homes, said Zac Cohen, the company’s general manager. It’s a new use case for the eKYC company which usually finds clients for its global identity verification among financial firms seeking to meet Know Your Customer regulations.

Photo courtesy of Trulioo

Zac Cohen, general manager of Trulioo

“In a natural disaster you have a lot of organizations that want to distribute funds to individuals who have been affected by these tragedies,” said Cohen. “We help a lot of those aid agencies distribute funds and verify individuals who are in need,. A lot of times people take advantage of natural disasters to claim money when they aren’t on the accepted list for these aid agencies. Forest fires tend to be the most dramatic. We are used to verify and confirm individuals so they can get the funds they need for personal well-being.”

It’s a long way from enabling a bank account opening.

“Individuals will apply, create an account and make requests to aid agencies. The agencies  they try to confirm it is a legitimate individual. Then, when they distribute those funds, they do another check to make sure they are sending it to the right location.”

Trulioo has also expanded to verifying business identities, which it can do throughout a supply chain. Businesses no longer buy supplies from companies just down the street or on the other side of town, companies large and small are often sourcing internationally, Cohen said.

“They may run into a problem where the supply chain is so muddled they don’t know who ultimately is servicing them. Businesses have policies in place where they don’t want to leverage services from companies engaged in illicit activities, like forced labor in third world countries. When you have a large and complicated supply chain, it’s difficult to see who owns that business down the line.

The company has data on 250 million companies and uses its business verification and ID verification to run checks on businesses downstream, and the legal entities that own those businesses.

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North Korea Uses Microsoft and Apple Technology for Cyberattacks, Researchers Say

North Korea has been cited by several governments and organizations for its hacking activities. Now, a new study of network data shows much of the technology North Korea employs for hacking comes from the U.S.

Despite trade sanctions, North Korea’s government has found a way to obtain products from Apple, Microsoft, and Korea-based Samsung to carry out cyberattacks around the world, researchers at cybersecurity intelligence company Recorded Future revealed on Wednesday. The company found that North Korea is using Windows 10, Apple’s iPhone X, and Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Plus, among other technologies, to conduct operations. However, most of the technology North Korea is using is older. For instance, Recorded Future found an iPhone 4S and Windows 7, among other products, still in use.

North Korea has been isolated from the rest of the world for decades. During that time, the country’s economy has suffered and the U.S., among others, has imposed sanctions that limit a company’s ability to export to and sell in North Korea.

To circumvent those sanctions, according to Recorded Future, North Korea has engaged in a variety of activities to obtain access to U.S. and Korean technologies.

In its report, Recorded Future said that North Korea has created fake addresses and names to sidestep sanctions — and also used shell companies and aliases outside of its borders to obtain equipment and bring it back. North Koreans living in countries where equipment from Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung can be obtained legally also play a role in the effort, according to the report.

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“Technology resellers, North Koreans abroad, and the Kim regime’s extensive criminal networks all facilitate the transfer of American technology for daily use by one of the world’s most repressive governments,” Recorded Future wrote in its report.

In other cases, however, North Korea has obtained equipment legally. Since 2002, in fact, the U.S. has exported nearly $ 484,000 in computers and electronics to North Korea.

But, since that’s hardly enough for all of the ruling party, hacking efforts, and “elites” in the country who need the technology, North Korea has employed the other schemes, Recorded Future said.

The data sheds some light on the secretive country and could explain to some degree how it’s been able to pull off some major cyberattacks. North Korea’s hackers have previously been linked to the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack that affected computers around the world. North Korea was also accused of hacking Sony in 2014.

“Unless there’s a globally unified effort to impose comprehensive sanctions on the DPRK, and multilateral cooperation to ensure that these sanctions cannot be thwarted by a web of shell companies,” Recorded Future wrote, “North Korea will be able to continue its cyberwarfare operations unabated with the aid of Western technology.”

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Nvidia Uses AI to Reconstruct Damaged Images

Software maker Nvidia (NVDA) has introduced a new way to edit or reconstruct images using artificial intelligence.

The deep learning method uses a process the company calls “image inpainting.” It can reconstruct images that could be missing pixels and can remove unwanted content within a photo and replace it with a computer-generated alternative.

“Our model can robustly handle holes of any shape, size location, or distance from the image borders. Previous deep learning approaches have focused on rectangular regions located around the center of the image, and often rely on expensive post-processing,” the NVIDIA researchers stated in their research paper. “Further, our model gracefully handles holes of increasing size.

For example, when you use Nvidia’s technology on a blank space where there is supposed to be a nose, instead of filling the space with its surrounding, the software adds a computer-generated nose.

The company hasn’t offered a time for when this technology could be released, but they do see it someday being implemented into current photo-editing software.

Nvidia, founded in the 1990s, makes graphics chips that can be found in computers, video games, and even self-driving cars. The company has currently been dominating the AI scene and even made its debut in the Fortune 500 last year at #387. The cofounder and CEO, Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang was also Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year for 2017.

Watch the video from Nvidia about this state-of-the-art technique below.

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Polls show Facebook losing trust as firm uses ads to apologize

SAN FRANCISCO/LONDON (Reuters) - Opinion polls published on Sunday in the United States and Germany indicated that a majority of the public were losing trust in Facebook over privacy, as the firm ran advertisements in British and U.S. newspapers apologizing to users.

FILE PHOTO: Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the annual Facebook F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, U.S., April 18, 2017. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Fewer than half of Americans trust Facebook to obey U.S. privacy laws, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, while a survey published by Bild am Sonntag, Germany’s largest-selling Sunday paper, found 60 percent of Germans fear that Facebook and other social networks are having a negative impact on democracy.

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for “a breach of trust” in advertisements placed in papers including the Observer in Britain and the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

“We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it,” said the advertisement, which appeared in plain text on a white background with a tiny Facebook logo.

The world’s largest social media network is coming under growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States, and is trying to repair its reputation among users, advertisers, lawmakers and investors.

This follows allegations that the British consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to users’ information to build profiles of American voters that were later used to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016.

U.S. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press” on Sunday that Facebook had not been “fully forthcoming” over how Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook data.

Warner repeated calls for Zuckerberg to testify in person before U.S. lawmakers, saying Facebook and other internet companies had been reluctant to confront “the dark underbelly of social media” and how it can be manipulated.

“BREACH OF TRUST”

Zuckerberg acknowledged that an app built by a university researcher had “leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014”.

A figurine is seen in front of the Facebook logo in this illustration taken March 20, 2018. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

“This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” Zuckerberg said, reiterating an apology first made last week in U.S. television interviews.

Facebook shares tumbled 14 percent last week, while the hashtag #DeleteFacebook gained traction online.

The Reuters/Ipsos online poll found that 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared with 66 percent who said they trust Amazon.com Inc, 62 percent who trust Alphabet Inc’s Google, 60 percent for Microsoft Corp.

The poll was conducted from Wednesday through Friday and had 2,237 responses. (reut.rs/2G9hvrv)

The German poll published by Bild was conducted by Kantar EMNID, a unit of global advertising holding company WPP, using representative polling methods, the firm said. Overall, only 33 percent found social media had a positive effect on democracy, against 60 percent who believed the opposite.

It is too early to say if distrust will cause people to step back from Facebook, eMarketer analyst Debra Williamson said in an interview. Customers of banks or other industries do not necessarily quit after losing faith, she said.

“It’s psychologically harder to let go of a platform like Facebook that’s become pretty well ingrained into people’s lives,” she said.

Data supplied to Reuters by the Israeli firm SimilarWeb, which measures global online audiences, indicated that Facebook usage in major markets and worldwide remained steady over the past week.

“Desktop, mobile and app usage has remained steady and well within the expected range,” said Gitit Greenberg, SimilarWeb’s director of market insights. “It is important to separate frustration from actual tangible impacts to Facebook usage.”

Additional reporting by William James in London, Dustin Volz in Washington D.C. and Chris Kahn in New Editing by Kevin Liffey

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