Equifax had Evidence of Chinese Espionage Before the Hack

Posted on September 12, 2018September 12, 2018 by Denise Simon

Fascinating that there is always more to the story. Remember, this was/is confidential and personal data. Further, Alibaba is a Chinese international holding company that is a counterpart to Amazon and specializes in artificial intelligence based in Hangzhou, China.

The General Accounting Office issued a report on Equifax. The GAO analysis detailed the steps Atlanta-based Equifax has taken since the breach to prevent similar attacks in the future. Last year, hackers had found a vulnerability in Equifax servers that gave them access to customer login credentials.

The report said the hackers hid in Equifax’s system for more than two months and mined data for credit card numbers, drivers licenses and social security numbers. The breach led the agency to make $200 million in security upgrades.

WSJ: Two years before Equifax Inc. stunned the world with the announcement it had been hacked, the credit-reporting company believed it was the victim of another theft, only this time at the hands of Chinese spies, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the previously undisclosed incident, security officials feared that former employees had removed thousands of pages of proprietary information before leaving and heading to jobs in China. Materials included code for planned new products, human-resources files and manuals.

Equifax went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Investigators from the company and the FBI came to view events at Equifax as potentially a huge theft of data—not of consumers’ personal data, as happened with the subsequent 2017 hacking of Equifax’s files, but of confidential business information.

Equifax security officials briefed the then-chief executive, Richard Smith, at a fall 2015 meeting, spreading high stacks of paper across the length of the boardroom table. The voluminous printouts represented what they feared was stolen. Adding to suspicions, the Chinese government had recently asked eight companies to help it build a national credit-reporting system.

At one point, Equifax grew so worried it began building a way to monitor the computer activity of all of its ethnic-Chinese employees, according to people familiar with the investigation. The resource-heavy project, which raised legal concerns internally, was short-lived.

Some investigators believed Equifax’s intense focus on the matter contributed to a delay in the company’s understanding the extent of the 2017 hack of consumers’ information, an event that hammered Equifax’s stock, cost some executives their jobs, including Mr. Smith, and damaged the company’s reputation.

Ultimately, the previously undisclosed investigation undertaken by the FBI stalled. The FBI wanted to pursue a criminal case, believing the theft of trade secrets costs the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars a year, with China the leading offender, said people familiar with the investigation. Equifax began to worry about legal exposure and how onerous the inquiry could become, according to these people, and eventually reduced its cooperation with law enforcement.

That left many of the questions raised by the investigation, both about Equifax and about China, unresolved.

This account of the events at Equifax is based on people familiar with the investigation.

Equifax, in a written statement, said it became aware in 2015 of “efforts by a former employee to obtain company information, and launched an internal investigation into his activities.” The company “brought the investigation to the attention of U.S. law enforcement authorities and cooperated with the federal agencies,” Equifax said.

“Although this individual had improperly obtained proprietary Equifax information,” the statement said, “the information we determined was accessed was general in nature and not material or harmful to Equifax, consumers or our business clients.” Equifax said the company has “no evidence to suggest that consumer data or other personal information was compromised, or that this individual targeted this type of information.”

Equifax didn’t address in its statement whether it thought other employees were involved. A person familiar with the company’s thinking disputed the notion that Equifax reduced its cooperation with law enforcement in a probe it had itself triggered.

Representatives of the FBI and CIA declined to comment. The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.

One of the former employees Equifax and the FBI investigated in connection with a possible business-information theft was Daniel Zou, who worked in Toronto. The company he joined in China was Ant Financial, a fast-growing financial-technology affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , founded by billionaire Jack Ma.

Both Ant and Mr. Zou denied any involvement in taking proprietary Equifax data. Alibaba referred questions to Ant.

Ant, based in Hangzhou, China, said it “has never used Equifax code, scripts or algorithms in the development of its own products and services.”

Mr. Zou, in a sworn statement provided by his lawyer, said, “I deny that I worked with or consulted with a network of Equifax colleagues to steal Equifax code for Ant Financial or that I provided any such code to Ant Financial.”

Interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in Washington, Mr. Zou, a 35-year-old Chinese-born Canadian citizen who graduated from the University of Toronto, repeated his denial and said that learning from the Journal of Equifax’s suspicions had been “a nightmare.”

Those suspicions arose in 2015, a few months after Mr. Zou left his job as an Equifax product manager to join Ant’s new credit-scoring business, which is known as Sesame Credit in English. Ant was among the companies asked by China’s central bank to develop credit-scoring services. Sesame launched its service in January 2015, several months before Mr. Zou came aboard.

Equifax’s data-loss prevention system, which guards against sensitive information leaving the corporate network, flagged the activities of Mr. Zou, according to people familiar with the investigation. The system alerted that an employee might have taken data off the network, and initially registered it as benign, they said.

Mr. Zou said in his interview with the Journal that, according to his understanding of how the system works, it would warn the person removing the data on the spot. He said he never received such a warning. Equifax declined to say whether that is how the system works or whether Mr. Zou received a warning.

At the same time, Equifax officials also had suspicions about a different employee, in another city. Equifax’s security chief, Susan Mauldin, approached the FBI with a question: What would it look like if we were being targeted by China?

FBI officials told her that in one common technique, a group makes plans to visit a company’s office to pitch a partnership, then at the last minute replaces delegation members with spies.

Around this time, a delegation from a Chinese business visited Equifax and swapped out some members at the last minute, fueling Equifax’s suspicions it was a target.

Company security officials decided to examine Mr. Zou’s computer activity. They discovered he had printed out thousands of pages of company information. The material related to the way credit scores are obtained, what different pieces of data mean and how to apply algorithms to assess troves of data, according to the people familiar with the investigation. They said some was information that could help explain products Equifax was working on.

At around the same time they were examining Mr. Zou’s systems, investigators discovered what they believed to be a major infiltration campaign. They found that other employees had sent code to their personal email accounts and uploaded it to software-development platforms others could access.

According to the people familiar with the probe, the investigators, by talking to Equifax employees and examining email accounts and LinkedIn messages sent to them, saw indications that recruiters purporting to represent Ant affiliate Alibaba had offered to triple salaries for certain ethnically Chinese Equifax employees—and provided instructions on specific Equifax information they should bring along if they jumped ship.

The investigators saw, as well, that Mr. Zou had searched the Equifax human-resources system to look up data analytics teams in the U.S. He had printed out contact information for many ethnic-Chinese employees, according to people familiar with the probe. They said some of those employees told colleagues they were later contacted by recruiters who claimed to be working on behalf of Alibaba.

The investigators found notes on Chinese messaging service WeChat in which another group of Equifax employees in North America, using their company-issued phones, arranged off-hours meetings to discuss work projects and left the company soon after, saying they were going to Ant or Sesame for big raises.

Ant said Mr. Zou is the only former Equifax employee it has hired since it began collecting employment history information in 2011. Ant said Mr. Zou began at its credit-scoring business in May 2015. It listed a five-figure starting salary for Mr. Zou and said he wasn’t promised any large bonuses.

Ant said it didn’t “directly or indirectly through third-party recruiters” encourage job applicants to steal Equifax information. Ant prohibits employees and recruiters from requesting such activity, the company said, adding that third-party recruiters aren’t authorized to make job offers on its behalf.

Ant said it hadn’t been contacted by Equifax or any government investigators about such matters. After receiving an inquiry from the Journal about Mr. Zou, Ant said, it investigated his information-technology activities and found no evidence he had ever provided Ant with any Equifax code, scripts or algorithms.

Mr. Zou said he worked in marketing and didn’t have access to Equifax code, algorithms and other proprietary information; never took any to Ant; wasn’t asked to; and never encouraged others to.

“I deny that I searched an internal Equifax human resources database to recruit Equifax employees to join Ant Financial,” Mr. Zou said in the sworn declaration provided by a lawyer. “I further deny that I printed contact information for ethnic-Chinese Equifax employees as part of an effort to recruit such employees to join Ant Financial.”

In the Journal interview, Mr. Zou said, “I think [where] this might come from is that during my time at Equifax I had a habit of sending work-related documents to my own email so that I could work at home. If any of those contain [any] of what they call the alleged proprietary information, right after I left Equifax and before I went back to China, I deleted them all. And I did not share that with anybody.”

If investigators were alarmed by his email practices, Mr. Zou said, “I think that’s a huge misunderstanding.”

Mr. Zou also said he printed out employee contact information for projects that required him to work with global colleagues. “Equifax Canada did not want to reinvent the wheel from beginning,” he said, “so my job was to piggyback the success case” from the company’s U.S., U.K. and Latin American regions.

He said he disposed of all the documents before moving to China and joining Ant, and he denied targeting any ethnicity. “If you search a data analytics team, the likelihood is high that you will reach a Chinese employee,” he said.

Mr. Zou said he had never been contacted by Equifax or any government authorities about data theft, and learning he was suspected caused him “emotional turmoil.”

Although Equifax had gone to the FBI—and although the bureau was eager to pursue the matter—Equifax officials by the middle of 2016 had grown wary of providing more information to federal investigators.

Equifax worried that doing so could trigger requirements under securities law for disclosure of material information, said the people familiar with the investigation. They said Equifax also was concerned that handing over access to its entire network, including international operations, as the FBI had requested, could run afoul of obligations in some countries where Equifax operates.

Around the middle of 2016, Equifax told its internal investigators to comply with any potential subpoenas but to stop proactively providing information to law enforcement, said the people familiar with the investigation.

The person familiar with Equifax who disputed the notion the company directed employees to be uncooperative said: “As the investigation progressed, we did ask that requests for information be passed through our legal office to ensure we were adhering to standard legal protocols.”

Equifax continued to monitor certain employees through 2016 and 2017. It eventually confronted several ethnically Chinese employees over activities found in its investigation, who left before the company took further action, according to people familiar with the probe.

FBI officials in Atlanta got the impression from Equifax’s then-CEO, Mr. Smith, and legal staff that the company didn’t believe it generally had information valuable enough to be the target of a major Chinese campaign.

Mr. Smith told colleagues even if thieves had taken code, they didn’t have Equifax’s consumer data, which meant the theft wouldn’t pose a competitive threat. Moreover, Equifax didn’t see a material impact on current operations because the information that appeared to have been stolen related to products in development, not to existing ones.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta ultimately determined it didn’t have evidence the suspected thefts were directed by the Chinese government, a top priority for law enforcement. The prosecutors decided they wouldn’t pursue a case against any individual, since Equifax wasn’t eager to do so, and since what former employees were suspected of taking was corporate information, rather than anything directly affecting U.S. consumers.

The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

Then, in September 2017, came blockbuster news from Equifax: the disclosure that a hacking of its files had exposed highly sensitive personal data on more than 140 million Americans.

Equifax had learned six months earlier, in March 2017, of a software vulnerability, but waited months to fully check its encrypted traffic to see whether it had been breached. Only in July 2017 did Equifax realize the hack had exposed personal information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth, of nearly half the U.S. population.

This delay was partially due to Equifax’s failure to resolve a dispute between its technology and information-security staffs at a time when top security people were focused on possible infiltration from China, in the opinion of some of the people familiar with the investigation.

The person familiar with Equifax’s thinking said the hack involved both human error and technological failure, and Equifax has been forthcoming about the causes.

In the weeks following the disclosure of that giant 2017 breach, Mr. Smith resigned, as did Ms. Mauldin and Equifax’s chief information officer, David Webb. All either couldn’t be reached or didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In January 2018, Chinese officials rolled out a state-backed credit-scoring company and gave Ant Financial an 8% stake.

Mr. Zou has returned to Canada. Ant transferred him from Sesame Credit to its Alipay international business unit in Hangzhou in mid-2017. On June 1 of this year, he moved to Alipay Canada in Vancouver.

Hey Moscow, What About the ‘neuroweapons’ Used in Cuba attacks

Posted on September 11, 2018September 11, 2018 by Denise Simon

General view of the U.S. Embassy in Havana after the U.S. government pulled more than half of its diplomatic personnel out of Cuba in September 2017. (Photo: Ernesto Mastrascusa/Getty Images)

Primer:

Neurotechnologies as Weapons of Mass Disruption or Future Asymmetric Warfare: Putative Mechanisms, Emerging Threats, and Bad Actor Scenarios

Intelligence agencies investigating mysterious “attacks” that led to brain injuries in U.S. personnel in Cuba and China consider Russia to be the main suspect, three U.S. officials and two others briefed on the investigation tell NBC News.

The suspicion that Russia is likely behind the alleged attacks is backed up by evidence from communications intercepts, known in the spy world as signals intelligence, amassed during a lengthy and ongoing investigation involving the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. agencies. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the intelligence.

The evidence is not yet conclusive enough, however, for the U.S. to formally assign blame to Moscow for incidents that started in late 2016 and have continued in 2018, causing a major rupture in U.S.-Cuba relations.

Since last year, the U.S. military has been working to reverse-engineer the weapon or weapons used to harm the diplomats, according to Trump administration officials, congressional aides and others briefed on the investigation, including by testing various devices on animals. As part of that effort, the U.S. has turned to the Air Force and its directed energy research program at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, where the military has giant lasers and advanced laboratories to test high-power electromagnetic weapons, including microwaves.

Although the U.S. believes sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon were likely used on the U.S. government workers, they are also exploring the possibility that one or more additional technologies were also used, possibly in conjunction with microwaves, officials and others involved in the government’s investigation say.

The U.S. has said 26 government workers were injured in unexplained attacks at their homes and hotels in Havana starting in late 2016, causing brain injuries, hearing loss and problems with cognition, balance, vision and hearing problems. Strange sounds heard by the workers initially led investigators to suspect a sonic weapon, but the FBI later determined sound waves by themselves couldn’t have caused the injuries. More here.

*** Truth be told, this investigation and the details are rather disjointed and weird.

Four scientists, including the first doctor to examine the diplomats reporting symptoms in Cuba, took part in a Pentagon-sponsored teleconference on Friday, where they announced new research results, including what they determined to be the probable use of “neuroweapons” in what they called the Havana Effect.

At issue are the more than two dozen U.S. government officials stationed in Havana, who have described hearing strange sounds, followed by a combination of medical symptoms, including dizziness, hearing loss and cognitive problems. More recently, a similar case has been reported in a U.S. embassy worker in Guangzhou, China. For months, a mix of secrecy and speculation has surrounded those incidents, including an increasingly popular theory that the diplomats were the victims of microwave weapons.

Michael Hoffer, an otolaryngologist at the University of Miami, who was the first to conduct tests on the embassy workers, said on the Friday call that the diplomats are suffering from a “neurosensory dysfunction,” which is primarily affecting their sense of balance.

The Friday call was organized as part of a study program sponsored by the Pentagon and titled “Probable Use of a Neuroweapon to Affect Personnel of US Embassy in Havana: Findings, Pathology, Possible Causes, and Disruptive Effects.”

A Pentagon official told Yahoo News that the briefing was offered by the scientific team for interested people in the Defense Department and was to gain “general knowledge” about their findings. “This didn’t have an operational element,” the official said. Read on from here.

Iran Using Same ‘Active Measure’ Tactics Against the U.S.

Posted on August 24, 2018August 24, 2018 by Denise Simon

When traveling internet sites, social media accounts and various news aggregator services, one needs to be even more suspect of what information is out there. Russia has been applying propaganda ‘active measure’ tactics for decades and due to the global internet system, the volume has gone beyond measure.

With all things Russia going on in Washington DC and in media, the success of active measures has been noticed by both China and Iran. Both have launched robust propaganda operations forcing the West and citizens to question authenticity of sites, articles and posts of all forms.

Watch out for those hashtags….influencing voters and fake/false news goes back to at least 2016. The operations are so effective that even big media has been duped and corrections are printed or made often when recognized. Some items are never corrected.

Iran’s Anti-US Propaganda Reflects regime’s instability photo

(Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google said on Thursday it had identified and terminated 39 YouTube channels linked to state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

Google has also removed 39 YouTube channels and six blogs on Blogger and 13 Google+ accounts.

“Our investigations on these topics are ongoing and we will continue to share our findings with law enforcement and other relevant government entities in the U.S. and elsewhere,” Google said in a blog post here

On Tuesday, Facebook Inc (FB.O), Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) collectively removed hundreds of accounts tied to an alleged Iranian propaganda operation.

Google, which had engaged cyber-security firm FireEye Inc (FEYE.O) to provide the company with intelligence, said it has detected and blocked attempts by “state-sponsored actors” in recent months.

FireEye said here it has suspected “influence operation” that appears to originate from Iran, aimed at audiences in the United States, the U.K., Latin America, and the Middle East.

Shares of FireEye rose as much as 10 percent to $16.38 after Google identified the company as a consultant.

***

The Daily Beast went for a deeper dive on the tactics by Iran and explained a few cases.

An Iranian propaganda campaign created fake Bernie Sanders supporters online, Facebook disclosed Tuesday.

In a press release, the social-media giant said it had removed 652 pages associated with political-influence campaigns traced to Iran, including coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, U.K., and U.S.”

The cybersecurity company FireEye, which first alerted Facebook to the influence campaign months ago, wrote in a separate posting on its site that it had traced the campaign—including posts from supposed “American liberals supportive of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders”—to Iran through email addresses and phone numbers associated with the “inauthentic” accounts.

The investigation began with FireEye’s discovery of a fake U.S. news outlet called Liberty Front Press, which Facebook says was created in 2013. The actors behind that site over time branched out into different personas intended to appeal to different audiences including “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes.” Examples included accounts like The British Left, which published content in support of U.K. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the pro-Palestinian Patriotic Palestinian Front. FireEye also says it “identified multiple Arabic-language, Middle East-focused sites” as part of the effort.

Unlike the Russian cyberinfluence campaign in 2016, FireEye didn’t find a complementary hacking campaign attached to the propaganda activity. Iran has spent big on developing its offensive online capabilities, but FireEye said it found no links to APT35—a hacking group that has targeted U.S. defense companies and Saudi energy firms. Instead, the security firm found links between the campaign and Iran’s state-run TV propaganda channel, PressTV.

The Iranian actors behind the campaign expanded beyond Facebook and Instagram and onto Twitter, according to FireEye. In a separate statement late Tuesday, Twitter announced it had suspended 284 accounts for what it said was “coordinated manipulation” and that “it appears many of these accounts originated from Iran.”

The Daily Beast recovered tweets from what appears to be an account associated with the campaign. @libertyfrontpr has since been deleted, but Google cache results show it linked back to the LibertyFrontPress.com website FireEye attributed to be part of the propaganda effort. The account was active as of at least Tuesday and is not listed as suspended on the platform.

The account used hashtags like “#Resist” and #NotMyPresident when tweeting out anti-Trump sentiments. It also weighed in against the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. “The #Senate has a responsibility to reject any nominee who would fail to be a fair-minded constitutionalist. That is #BrettKavanaugh. We must #StopKavanaugh.”

In a rare move for Holocaust-denying Iranian propaganda, @libertypr slammed the Republican Party for allowing anti-Semite and Holocaust denier John Fitzgerald to run for a seat in the California legislature.

In addition to the U.S. themes, Liberty’s Twitter account also targeted opponents of the Iranian government, including the Mujahedeen Khalq exile group, or MEK, which advocates the overthrow of Iran’s clerical government, with hashtags like “#BanTerrorOrg.”

The takedown marks the second time since the 2016 election that Facebook has appeared to act without U.S. government pressure to stop an alleged political-influence campaign. In late July, Facebook took down a handful of sock-puppet accounts purporting to be black, Hispanic, and #Resistance activists. Facebook didn’t attribute that campaign to a specific country or group, but it did note that some of the accounts had links to the infamous Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.

Facebook said Tuesday that it had taken down the new batch of pages only after waiting “many months” after being alerted to the campaign by FireEye. The delay allowed the company to further investigate the campaign and improve its defenses against future efforts.

Trends in Chinese Military Worrying the U.S.

Posted on August 21, 2018August 21, 2018 by Denise Simon

WASHINGTON —

China is not an enemy, but it is certainly an adversary of the United States, and the Defense Department’s 2018 report to Congress examines the trends in Chinese military developments.

Congress mandates the report, titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.” While the report highlights military developments, it also addresses China’s whole-of-government approach to competition.

China’s economic development is fueling extraordinary changes in relationships it maintains around the world, according to the report. On the face of it, China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative sounds benign – it looks to build infrastructure for developing countries and Chinese neighbors.

Chinese leaders have funded serious projects as far away as Africa under the initiative. They have built roads in Pakistan and made major inroads in Malaysia. China has a major stake in Sri Lanka. Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Laos and Djibouti also are involved.

The Chinese government seeks to overturn the established international order that has kept the peace in the region since World War II and allowed Asian countries to develop.

But “One Belt, One Road” money and projects come with strings. The “one road” leads to China, and nations are susceptible to Chinese influence on many levels – political, military, and especially, economic.

Economic Clout

In 2017, China used its economic clout in South Korea as a bludgeon to get Seoul to not allow the United States to deploy the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system in the country as a counterweight to North Korea’s nuclear missile program. The Chinese government informally lowered the boom on South Korea economically to influence the THAAD decision.

South Korean cars and other exports were embargoed. About a quarter of all goods South Korea exports goes to China, so this had an immediate effect on the economy. In addition, tourism suffered, as nearly half of all entries to South Korea are from China, and South Korean retail stores in China were crippled.

The South Korean government decided to allow the THAAD to deploy, but China’s economic muscle movement had to be noted in other global capitals.

South China Sea

“In its regional territorial and maritime disputes, China continued construction of outposts in the Spratly Islands, but also continued outreach to South China Sea claimants to further its goal of effectively controlling disputed areas,” the DoD reports says in its executive summary. In other words, China is using military power and diplomatic efforts in tandem to claim the South China Sea.

The People’s Liberation Army has come a long way from the human-wave attacks of the Korean War, and Chinese leaders want to build a military worthy of a global power. “Chinese military strategy documents highlight the requirement for a People’s Liberation Army able to secure Chinese national interests overseas, including a growing emphasis on the importance of the maritime and information domains, offensive air operations, long-distance mobility operations, and space and cyber operations,” the report says.

Chinese military planners looked at what the United States accomplished in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991 and charted their way forward. The PLA is fundamentally restructuring to challenge and beat any military in the world.

The PLA – still the largest force in the world – actually cut people to streamline command and control and modernize forces. The Chinese seek to win at all levels of conflict, from regional conflicts to wars with peer competitors. “Reforms seek to streamline command and control structures and improve jointness at all levels,” the report said. The PLA is using realistic training scenarios and exercising troops and equipment regularly.

New Capabilities

China is investing billions in new capabilities including artificial intelligence, hypersonic technology, offensive cyber capabilities and more. China also has launched an aircraft carrier and added many new ships to the PLA Navy. The Chinese Navy is more active and making more port calls than in years past. Further, the PLA Marine Corps is expanding from 10,000 personnel to 30,000.

The PLA Air Force has been reassigned a nuclear mission, giving China a nuclear triad — along with missile and subs — for the first time.

Cyber operations play a significant role in the Chinese military. The PLA has a large corps of trained and ready personnel. Cyber espionage is common, and there are those who believe China was able to get plans of the F-35 Thunderbolt II joint strike fighter, which they incorporated into its J-20 stealth fighter.

The U.S. National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy recognize that China and Russia are strategic competitors of the United States. Still, the United States must engage with China, and maintenance of cordial military-to-military relations is in both nations’ best interests.

“While the Department of Defense engages substantively with the People’s Liberation Army, DoD will also continue to monitor and adapt to China’s evolving military strategy, doctrine and force development, and encourage China to be more transparent about its military modernization,” the report says.

The United States military will adapt to counter and get ahead of moves by any competitor, DoD officials said.

K2/Spice Overdoses, Sadly Very Common

Posted on August 16, 2018August 16, 2018 by Denise Simon

It is sold at convenience stores and costs $20-$50 per 3 grams. It is legal and is undetectable in drug tests.

It has a few names other than laced marijuana, such as K2, Spice, Genie, Mojo or Zohai. Head shops sell it as for the most part it is not regulated in the United States but is banned in most of Europe.

One K2 sample tests negative for Fentanyl as New Haven ...

Synthetic cannabinoid users report some effects similar to those produced by marijuana:

elevated mood
relaxation
altered perception—awareness of surrounding objects and conditions
symptoms of psychosis—delusional or disordered thinking detached from reality

Psychotic effects include:

extreme anxiety
confusion
paranoia—extreme and unreasonable distrust of others
hallucinations—sensations and images that seem real though they are not

People who have used synthetic cannabinoids and have been taken to emergency rooms have shown severe effects including:

rapid heart rate
vomiting
violent behavior
suicidal thoughts

More here

***

Chinese manufacturers are shipping thousands of pounds synthetic chemicals into the U.S. to make dangerous recreational drugs – and it’s all legal.

The Drug Enforcement Agency and U.S. lawmakers are struggling to keep up with the influx of new, completely untested, compounds that Chinese chemists offer up online.

Websites for Chinese manufacturers advertise of host of chemical substances that can be bought legally by American citizens and shipped to the U.S.

The drugs go by street names like Spice, Bath Salts, Molly, Smiles and N-bomb. They are meant to mimic the effects of marijuana, cocaine, LSD and other banned substances. Many forms of these drugs were legal until only very recently. More here.

***

More than 70 people overdosed in or around a historic Connecticut park near the Yale University campus on Wednesday after receiving what authorities believe was synthetic marijuana laced with the powerful opioid fentanyl. Although there have been no deaths, at least two people suffered life-threatening symptoms, according to authorities.

Connecticut Public Radio‘s Diane Orson reports that at least one person has been arrested in connection with the case.

“After 8:00 [a.m. Wednesday], we ended up with 12 victims in a 40-minute period. That caused us to respond with a multi-casualty incident,” New Haven Fire Chief John Alston said. “It brought out Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven Police Department, Fire Department, [American Medical Response]. We also have representatives with the DEA here.”

Rick Fontana, the director of emergency operations for New Haven, told Connecticut Public Radio’s Tucker Ives that 72 people were transported to local hospitals while four patients refused treatment on scene, for a total of 76 cases.

“Only a few required admittance to the hospital, and most were discharged or left before any treatment,” Fontana told Ives.

Most of the overdoses occurred on the New Haven Green, a downtown park adjacent to Yale.

“We literally had people running around the Green providing treatment,” Fontana said Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

“Do not come down to the Green and purchase this K2,” New Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell told WVIT-TV. “It is taking people out very quickly, people having respiratory failure. Don’t put your life in harm.”

The AP reports, “Paramedics and police officers remained at the park all day as more people fell ill. Some became unconscious and others vomited, authorities said. Emergency responders rushed to one victim as officials were giving a news conference nearby late Wednesday morning.”

Connecticut Public Radio reports:

“[Fire Chief] Alston says the substance appears to be some type of synthetic cannabis, but authorities are not sure. Some of the victims were unconscious and in respiratory distress.

At first, the drug [naloxone] — used to treat narcotic overdoses — appeared not to work. ‘Narcan was not effective here at the scene,’ said Alston. ‘However higher concentrations of it in the emergency room proved effective.’

He says one of the victims still had some of the drug, which has been sent off to a lab for testing.”

The Hartford Courant said authorities had determined that patients had smoked the synthetic cannabinoid K-2 laced with fentanyl.

Officer David Hartman was quoted by the newspaper as saying the patients were being treated for overdose-related respiratory illnesses.

WVIT reports that the man arrested “is believed connected to at least some of the overdoses” and “had drugs on him at the time of his arrest, [but] has yet to be charged in any of the overdose cases.”

Gov. Dannel Malloy said Wednesday that the state Department of Public Health and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services were assisting New Haven with the rash of overdoses.

“Today’s emergency is deeply troubling and illustrative of the very real and serious threat that illicit street drugs pose to health of individuals,” Malloy said, according to the Hartford Courant. “The substance behind these overdoses is highly dangerous and must be avoided.”

The AP notes, “New Haven first responders were called to a similar overdose outbreak on the Green on July 4, when more than a dozen people were sick from synthetic marijuana. The city also saw more than a dozen synthetic marijuana overdoses in late January. No deaths were reported in either outbreak.”

The latest incident in Connecticut comes as new preliminary estimates on 2017 overdose deaths were released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC said a record 72,000 Americans died last year because of drug overdose — about 10 percent higher than previous figures. It said major causes of the increase in deaths are the growing number of people using opioids and the increased potency of the drugs themselves.