Is Technology Helping or Hindering Human Development - American Trucker

08/07/2021 Is technology helping or hindering human development?
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TECHNOLOGY
Is technology helping or hindering human development?

A new survey finds that while technology is improving business processes and re-
ordering personal living, it may be wrecking interpersonal skills.
American Trucker staff
FEB 12, 2018
A new survey commissioned by cloud systems provider Axway finds that technology is
rapidly re-ordering the work world and personal lives of humans – and not necessarily in
good ways.
Conducted by international research firm Research+Data Insights (RDI), the online survey
encompassed 2,653 adults in the U.S., France, the U.K., Australia and Germany.
Respondents were a mix of male and female, ranging in age from 18 to 60 years old. The
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08/07/2021 Is technology helping or hindering human development? | American Trucker
poll found that despite huge investments from organizations across almost every industry
in technologies that transform business processes and enable new models for working,
some 70% of the respondents said technology is having a much greater impact on their
personal lives, with 75% of Millennials versus older generations (66%) stating that their
personal lives have been impacted more by technology.
Yet despite most of those polled (91%) agreeing that technology has had a positive impact
on our lives, whether in the personal or professional realm, the survey identified key
concerns around its impact on “interpersonal skills.” The top concerns were:
53% said that today’s level of interaction with technology is killing the art of good
conversation, with women (56%) more likely than men (49%).
40% said technology is making people more impatient.
39% said that technology is reducing attention spans.
As organizations continue to invest in new technologies and look to accelerate the impact
of technology in the professional world, Axway added that they need to carefully consider
how new technologies can replicate human behavior such as artificial intelligence. Such
new technologies present a concern for 85% of consumers, the firm noted, with the top
concerns being:
34% worry about machines invading their privacy.

29% are concerned about machines taking over jobs.
21%, or one in five consumers, are concerned about machines taking over the
world.
Further, with the rise of crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, technology will play an
increasingly larger role in the future of payments made by humans, Axway noted. Indeed,
its poll found one in four consumers (23%) believe digital currency will most likely replace
cash within the next 10-15 years.
Yet a lot of worry remains on the minds of many of those polled regarding data privacy.
New technologies capture huge volumes of personal data that organizations use to
develop, market and sell their products and services, said Axway, and 83% of respondents
to its survey are concerned about how organizations use their personal data, while 53% do
not like the idea of organizations having their personal information. Consumers in
Australia (59%) and the U.S. (55%) are most concerned, while respondents in France
(44%) are the least concerned, the firm noted
“In 2017, we saw technology continue to evolve at a rapid pace as innovations such as
artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, block chain and augmented reality started to
reach the mainstream,” noted Vince Padua, chief innovation and technology officer at
Axway. “These technologies are quickly transforming the relationship between man and
machine and are ultimately making our lives easier. However, this study reveals that the
competitive pressure and digital disruption are increasing, and using the right technology
is necessary to gain the upper hand. Looking ahead to 2018, results from this survey will
help inform how organizations can leverage technology to provide faster innovation,
expand their digital business ecosystems and obtain higher levels of customer experience.”
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TECHNOLOGY
The next pandemic: Cybercrime

The transportation industry, where a lot of money changes hands every second, is
becoming a big target for cybercriminals. If a fleet isn’t prepared for an attack, it might
already be too late.
Josh Fisher
JUN 23, 2021
Cybersecurity is like the COVID-19 virus, according to CarriersEdge CEO Jane Jazrawy. “If
you’re not protecting yourself, you can get it. You won’t know it right away, and it’s going
to be really detrimental when it happens. You’ll wish you could turn back the clock—but
you can’t,” she said.
COVID-19 isn’t the only pandemic the world will face this decade, stated Christopher
Krebs, former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
“Considered a low-dollar, online nuisance crime only a few short years ago, ransomware
has exploded into a multibillion-dollar global racket that threatens the delivery of the very
services so critical to helping us collectively get through the COVID pandemic,” he said in
testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity in May. “To put it
simply, we are on the cusp of a global pandemic of a different variety, driven by greed, an
avoidably vulnerable digital ecosystem, and an ever-widening criminal enterprise.”
Cybercrimes have been around since the early days of computer networks in the 1970s.
While these crimes have steadily increased in the decades since the U.S. Defense
Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) led to the
internet, cybercrimes have reached a torrid pace since the COVID-19 pandemic changed
the office work landscape in the U.S. Just last spring, the FBI reported a 300% increase in
cybercrimes between March and May 2020. The transportation industry has seen similar
surges in attacks this year, according to Ben Barnes, McLeod Software’s vice president of
IT services and chief information security officer.
Sources: FBI, Cybint, Travelers
“We didn’t see a lot of attacks in January and February, but in March and April, the
ransomware attacks have escalated in our industry, and we don’t know why exactly,”
Barnes, whose company provides transportation and trucking software solutions,
told FleetOwner. “But if we can map these patterns and know the same thing happened
last year in March and April when we saw attacks go up, we’re starting to see a pattern.”
The May 7 ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline Co., which supplies 45% of the East
Coast’s fuel, is one of the latest examples of a cyberattack’s power. The breach forced the
company to shut down its four main pipelines between Texas and New Jersey, leading to
fuel market concerns. Shortly after the attack, Colonial said it was breached through its
corporate computer system.
The transportation industry has become a high-value target, Barnes said, because it is so
big and “there is so much money changing hands every second of every day.”
If cybercriminals gain access to a fleet’s IT system and install ransomware, the company
will face some complex decisions, Barnes noted. “A ransomware attack in our industry can
easily shut down your business for three days. You can’t dispatch loads, you can’t pay
drivers or conduct financial transactions of any sort, and you may not be able to use
email,” he said. “Companies that don’t have an incident response plan in place may be
looking at one or two weeks of inactivity. The impact on the business can be severe and
lasting.”
Human error
More than 90% of cybersecurity problems originate from human error, according to
Cybint, a firm that offers cybersecurity education and training for businesses. “That is
human error on emails, people that left open or misconfigured their router or firewall and
essentially left holes for attackers to come in,” Barnes noted as examples. “Human error
can come from all over the place—it’s not just one area. It’s not just email. Education
awareness can go a long way.”
Cybercriminals, he said, are like most other criminals: They are looking for an easy way in.
He compared businesses to a bunch of homes on a cul-de-sac. “You don’t want to be the
house with the doors open, no guard dog, no cars in the driveway,” Barnes said. “You want
to be the house that has a security system and locks its doors. They are going to move on to
attack the easier target. You don’t want to be the low-hanging fruit.”
How hackers use ransomware is evolving, according to Scott Hellberg, director of

information security governance, risk and compliance for Sentry, an insurance provider
for long-haul fleets and owner-operators. “At one point, ransomware was simply malware
loaded into a phishing email,” he told FleetOwner. “With that, [the hacker] will gain access
to the machine and encrypt it.”
Now, he said, cybercriminals are taking more of a “shotgun” approach where they don’t
have a specific target. The goal is to get the malware on as many networks and machines as
possible. Then, once the hackers have access to a network, they decide when to activate the
ransomware. Cybercriminals are “betting on the fact that most people don’t do a good job
with backups and have put themselves in a position where their data is one of the most
important aspects of them being in business,” Hellberg explained.
Businesses without good data backup plans are most susceptible to being held at ransom,
Hellberg said. If businesses do not have a good backup system in place, cybercriminals
could force the organization to pay a ransom in whatever cryptocurrency the attackers
want. A cybercriminal can lock up an IT system until the victim company pays for a “cyber
key” to regain access to the data.
Sometimes this malware lies dormant in a company’s network or an individual computer.

Barnes said it could become like a “pyramid scheme” for hackers once they gain access to a
system. Along with selling access to various criminal networks on the dark web,
cybercriminals like to go after the same organizations more than once.
“We’ve seen some midmarket and smaller transportation firms get hit multiple times,”
Barnes said. “That is as baffling to me as any of this because if you got hit once, you’re on a
list. Suppose [a hacker] has credentials to get into your system. In that case, that attacker
can sell those credentials to another attacker—and that attacker will go and map out your
network and find everything you have, and they will sell it to another attacker who will run
ransomware on it. Well, each one of these sales puts that information out there for public
knowledge, and that can be resold yet again.”
Companies that don’t tighten up their cybersecurity, make changes, or learn from the past
are the companies most likely to get attacked multiple times, Barnes said.
“If a fleet hasn’t started thinking about cybersecurity yet, then they’re probably being
targeted right now,” Jazrawy told FleetOwner. “It’s just too late now. You should be
immediately starting something now if you haven’t done it because someone has probably
found you. It’s crazy not to be doing something, and that something has to include both
your backend systems and your people because that is how they are getting to you.”
Print a plan
Chris Sandberg, vice president of information security for Trimble Transportation, said
that larger fleets tend to have better cybersecurity plans than smaller carriers. But no
matter the business size, a company’s cybersecurity plan should start with examining its
critical workflows, he said.
“Figure out what workflows are actually critical to your system,” he told FleetOwner.
“Then make sure you document those workflows. I always encourage people to make sure
that you print them out and redo this at least annually, if not quarterly.”
The printouts should include workflows and who has access to what information and
network systems. The hard copies should also include procedures and phone numbers to
call if there is a system breach. Sandberg suggests putting all of this critical information
“in big red binders and put it everywhere.”
Sources: FBI, Cybint, Travelers
While creating these documents of company workflows and information, Sandberg said,
fleet managers and executives will learn more about their critical processes, such as who
has access to what within the system. “From there, make sure only the people that need
access have access,” he suggested as a way to tighten control.
Most importantly, Sandberg said, have an offline system. “It can be something as simple as
somebody writing a little [computer] script, copying the files to another file share that the
main users don’t have permission to [access], which is what we call an offline backup,” he
explained. “So, if someone gets infected with something like a CryptoLocker virus, they
can’t screw up the backup.”
How often a company backs up its system depends on the business, Sandberg added. “It
depends on the criticality,” he said. “If the business can accept losing a day’s worth of data,
back it up once a day. If they can accept losing five minutes of data, copy it every five
minutes. The criticality of the data is what drives the backup schedule.”
McLeod’s Barnes said it’s important for fleets to have a playbook ready in case they are
attacked so they’re “not reacting in a panic.” He also suggested that fleets get cybersecurity
insurance, which only 55% of U.S. businesses have, according to a 2020 study by
Travelers.
Training and education

CarriersEdge’s Jazrawy said the most common risk to fleets right now is employees
clicking on the wrong links in emails that look legitimate but lead to “a nasty website or
downloads some sort of malware.” She said employees in her company had received
emails mimicking Jazrawy that ask those employees to do a task for her, such as buying
gift cards and relaying the gift card information back via email.
“Another time, I had a staffer get a fake email from me asking them to email back their
phone number, claiming I needed to call them,” she said. “This was ridiculous because I
already have everybody’s numbers. But if they send back their number, then [the phisher]
tries to call you and take it further somehow.”
McLeod’s Barnes said he’s commonly asked how many clicks of a bad email link it takes to
infect a company’s system. “One. It only takes one click if you open something bad,” he
said.
All of this is done by cybercriminals who are trying to infiltrate companies through
employees. “People are by far the weakest link,” said Jazrawy, whose company creates
training programs for drivers and fleets. And a newer “people target” is truck drivers.
“The biggest risk that I see right now is that companies aren’t training their drivers
because they think that the only people who need to be trained about cybersecurity are the
people in the office because those are the people who are using the system,” Jazrawy said.
“I think that’s a very dangerous way to think because the drivers might not be using your
systems directly, but they are certainly talking or sending messages back and forth to the
people who are using your system. What are they forwarding or doing without
understanding?”
Barnes said companies are looking for a 100% guarantee that cybercriminals won’t get into
their systems. “I don’t think that exists. You have to do the right things. Getting more
preventative is like how you eat an elephant—you take one bite at a time. If you've done
that and you look up and half the elephant is gone, then you're into some really good,
multiple phases of your security approach.”
He added that those “first few bites of the elephant” aren’t going to cost a company a lot in
their cybersecurity journey. Just having data backup systems can go a long way. “If you
can’t 100% prevent an attack and an attack happens, what do you do?” Barnes said.
“Having a good backup is No. 1. That doesn’t cost a great deal of money to set up, but you
would be amazed at how many transportation companies don’t have reliable backups.”
Jazrawy said it doesn’t make sense just to train some employees on the dangers of
cybersecurity. “It’s not just the company’s security; it’s people’s personal security,” she
added. “They should all be educated on how to protect themselves—even when it has
nothing to do with the company they work for.”
Most drivers, unlike office workers, are not spending much of their time online, and that
can make them susceptible. “If no one explains to them what a phishing attempt looks like,
they can get tricked,” she explained.
This can be a particular problem for drivers whose first language isn’t English, Jazrawy
said. Since many attempted cyberattacks come from other countries, a native English
speaker might more easily pick up on a scam because of poor grammar or spelling. “I’ve
noticed that when there are issues, it tends to be non-native English speakers who fall for
it because words are what is being used in a lot of these phishing emails. I think that is
something to watch out for.”
Jazrawy said this is something she has noticed more recently and has been working it into
the onboarding process for new employees. “I have had to show my staff pictures of
phishing email examples and explain why I would never actually send an email like that,”
she explained.
She said this is important for companies to explain to employees. “If you’re the owner of a
200-person company and you don’t talk or email with everyone every day, if someone
sends a fake message from your account, an employee might not know it’s not from you,”
Jazrawy said. “Because they don’t know how you sound in a day-to-day email, they might
just automatically respond because they think it’s actually a message from the owner of the
company.”
So Jazrawy created a graphic that shows new employees what type of emails she would
send, including how she would greet the recipient (“I would never start a message with
‘Dear so-and-so’”) and even how she would sign an email. “So, they can very clearly see
what I will say and what I won’t say.”
CarriersEdge offers a cybersecurity course for drivers that the company also uses
internally for its own employees. “Everybody from developers to customer service goes
through that course,” Jazrawy said. “And what we also do is when we get scam messages,
we talk about them. We’re constantly sharing information about fake messages going
around because they’re definitely increasing.”
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TECHNOLOGY
Omnitracs adds drowsy and distracted driver detection to SmartSense

system
Every day on U.S. highways, distracted/drowsy driving kills 10 people. Omnitracs
SmartSense for Inattentive Driving+ uses AI to alert drivers before a crash to bring
these numbers down.
Josh Fisher
JUN 15, 2021
CINCINNATI — Distracted driving continues to plague U.S. roadways, killing nearly nine
people per day in motor vehicle crashes in 2019, a 10% increase over the previous year,
according to the latest National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. Omnitracs’
next generation of SmartSense uses SmartDrive technology to integrate cameras, sensors,
AI, and computer vision to detect inattention and help keep drivers focused on the road.
Omnitracs, the SaaS-based fleet management and data analytics provider, just unveiled
SmartSense for Inattentive Driving+, which it said can detect suspected sleep, drowsiness,
cell phone usage, smoking, and general inattention. The system then sends an alert into
the cab so drivers can take action to avoid potential collisions and unsafe driving. It will be
available as an add-on feature for Omnitracs’ fleet customers later this summer.
“Through the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, the computer vision of the actual
camera itself, we can clearly articulate the difference between inattention and drowsiness,”
Ayron McLochlin, Omintracs vice president of sales, told American Trucker during an
interview at the National Private Truck Council annual management conference and
exhibition. “Where that’s really important is the type of coaching interaction you do with a
driver. If they’re picking up a cell phone—or any other general inattention—it is one thing,
but if a driver is falling asleep or they are asleep, the drivers, as well as the companies,
want to know because everyone wants them home safe.”
SmartDrive - Inattentive Driving
Drowsy driving
Drowsy driving, as NTHSA calls it, led to 697 deaths on the road in 2019. The
administration said that most often, drowsy-driving crashes occur between midnight and
6 a.m., usually with a lone driver behind the wheel without any passengers, and on rural
roads and highways. All of those instances could describe the working conditions of
professional fleet drivers.
SmartSense for Inattentive Driving+ detects and proactively notifies drivers when they are
distracted or drowsy, sending immediate in-cab feedback for fleets large and small. The
software, according to Omnitracs, uses AI and sensor data to instantly and accurately
identify inattention based on head position, eyelids being open or shut, and direction of
eye gaze, phone use, etc.
SmartDrive, which Omnitracs acquired in 2020, updated the SmartSense platform last
summer to include capabilities that can detect when a truck is traveling too fast for
conditions and when a truck is stopped or parked in an unsafe location, which it calls
SmartSense for Sitting Duck. The current and future SmartSense technology works off 20
years’ worth of training and informing sensors using insights and data from more than
300 million analyzed driving events logged across more than 30 billion miles in various
transportation sectors.
McLochlin told American Trucker that its customers are excited about SmartDrive
becoming part of Omnitracs. “We get a lot of good vibes about the combination between
Omnitracs and SmartDrive and what the future holds between the two organizations,” he
said. “There are a lot of synergies there. They can really help our customers and help our
customers be able to grow with the technologies and get more return on investments.”
Distracted driving
There were 3,142 distracted-driving-related deaths recorded on U.S. highways in 2019,

according to the latest NHTSA data, which jumped 9.9% from 2018. “Distracted driving is
a pandemic in itself,” McLochlin said. “We want to make sure fleets are safe. We want to
make sure drivers are safe. Drivers want to make sure they’re safe.”
As the technology capabilities in driver assistance and observance grow and become more
readily accepted by drivers, McLochlin said that Omnitracs wants to “lean in with a way to
be able to clearly articulate between inattention and drowsy or asleep. Because you want to
coach drivers differently. If he’s falling asleep, you want a much more aggressive type of
alert because they want to wake up—because nobody wants to fall asleep while driving.”
Using two cameras built into a single unit, Inattentive Driving+ offers visibility of the
entire cab and details of the driver’s face, eyes, and hands to identify drowsiness, sleep,
phone use, cigarette use, seatbelt use, and other safety-critical behaviors.
The technology enhances the risk detection that is already built into the SR4, the hardware
created by SmartDrive that includes cameras, sensors, and controller that supports
onboard driver systems and computer-vision technology. In addition, the solution can be
updated over-the-air and Omnitracs said it is easy to install. The system also offers wide-
angle and zoom-in views that provide context, so detection can be tied to the overall safety
program, aiding in determining if systemic issues need to be resolved, such as lack of sleep
due to a medical or family problem.
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