Reposted from Security Management

In March 2013, a student at the University of Central Florida (UCF) was poised to carry out a gun attack in Tower 1, a dormitory that hosts 500 students. He planned to pull the fire alarm, then start shooting his classmates as the building was evacuated. When it came time to carry out the attack, however, his weapon jammed. As responding officers closed in, he took his own life.  

While security cameras at the Orlando-based university captured the incident, first responders were unable to view video during the situation because it was hosted on a local server and getting to the recorder would possibly put them in harm's way. Similarly, during the investigative period, the building was locked down, and the video could not be accessed.

In the immediate aftermath of the active shooter situation, it took more than eight hours to get in touch with the person in charge of the video management system for the building, says Jeff Morgan, director of security and emergency management for UCF. The sworn campus police department ended up having to confiscate the local network recording device as evidence.

The active shooter situation, which highlighted the limitations of the campus video infrastructure, helped the university realize it was time to reevaluate its security technologies. "We knew we were one weapon jam away from our own Virginia Tech here at UCF," he says, referring to the April 2007 massacre that resulted in the death of 32 people in Blacksburg, Virginia. "That's when we realized we needed someone to come in and fix it. We can't have folks without access to those cameras when needed, and not being able to get a hold of people in the middle of the night." 

Strategy. The department decided to hire a subject matter expert from the security world–someone who could bring in a mix of technologies that were scalable for the growing campus and user-friendly.

In December 2014, UCF hired Joseph Souza, CPP, PSP, as its assistant director of security. Souza says he was immediately interested in integrating the university's disparate video systems into one platform. 

"We had 58 different camera servers run mostly by IT across the university, and there were no standards on how the camera systems were run," Souza notes. "There was no standardization on what cameras were purchased, recording resolution, frame rate, duration, or retention." 

The access control system was also in need of an upgrade, he adds. "We had several different access control systems, several different key systems; none of that had been consolidated in any way."

Part of the security team's solution was to hire coordinators for both the camera and access control systems. The two hires were university employees who came from the IT department. "They had strong IT backgrounds but also security experience, so for me it was the best possible fit, because both technologies rely heavily on IT," Souza explains. 

The security team began partnering with the UCF IT department to benchmark new products before buying them—a practice that continues. "That's something we do constantly," he says. "We evaluate new products, we establish and approve product lists, and then that allows us to implement cameras and access control for new construction." 

Souza has helped his department get involved in construction projects on campus so that security is integrated from the start. "We've been involved at the ground level of planning and design," he says. "We attend the weekly meetings with the construction team and we make sure that all the security products are put in all the proper places with security in mind." 

One such project is the university's new downtown campus in the Paramore district of Orlando. UCF is partnering with Valencia College to build an academic center, which will have a housing facility, parking garage, utility plant, public safety building, and academic structure. The security and emergency management teams were involved in the planning, design, and now construction of those buildings on the new campus.

The downtown district is being revitalized, and Souza notes that the project is not without its challenges. In the leadup to the campus groundbreaking, UCF partnered with Orlando Police, Orange County public schools, and Orange County emergency managers to increase security in the area. Together, they worked to expand contract security and police presence, as well as cameras and emergency call towers.

"It is already paying dividends, as our staff and students appreciate the additional security presence," Souza says, "and we have seen a decline in the nefarious activity in that area."

Video management. After the active shooter incident, UCF wanted to upgrade to one platform that could manage video across the entire campus. This would make upgrading units easier as well. 

"In the past, we had a few hundred folks that had access to cameras, and if we needed to push an update or a patch, we had to go through every individual computer," Morgan explains. "We had disparate servers throughout the campus…a lot of them were reaching end-of-life, so we knew eventually we'd have to do an consolidation effort." 

UCF put out a call for proposals to vet various video management system vendors, and brought in the finalists for panel-style question and answer sessions. 

In April 2017, the university chose Pivot3's hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform, which uses VMS software from Milestone. "Pivot3 stuck out far and above everyone else's capabilities for what we wanted to do," Souza says. 

The Pivot3 HCI platform consolidates servers, storage, and client workstations into one solution managed from a single administrative interface. It took UCF two months to migrate its old recordings from its various VMS servers to the new system, and completed the project in July 2017. The system has redundancy built-in, so that if hardware failure occurs, previously recorded video is protected. With several research projects and laboratories across campus, this type of data protection is crucial. 

"On the maintenance side, if cameras go down, cameras need work, or lightning strikes–whatever it is–it's a lot easier for us to see what's down and repair it as soon as possible, with everything all in one platform," Morgan notes. 

The university also has to abide by certain privacy requirements for some of its research and education initiatives. "We have a lot of applications where the cameras are used to help people train to be counselors," Souza notes, "and we have labs with cadavers where medical research is conducted." With Pivot3 HCI, the video server environment can be segmented to isolate those cases, and privacy rules can be applied.  

Every user with access to video now undergoes training. "By and large, we no longer allow servers to export video," Souza says, noting that keeping a lid on video access helps the university better protect its students. "We put very tight policy around that, and training, to make sure our university isn't going to end up on a news story for misuse of surveillance systems," he says. The university limits exporting privileges to campus police and other law enforcement.

Cameras. With the new video infrastructure, surveillance has become a more user-friendly experience, Morgan says. The campus is better equipped to deal with any situation that may arise, from emergencies to everyday activities at a large university, because there is a single login to watch cameras across the entire campus. 

The advantages of the new system recently came to light when campus police were tracking two suspicious individuals moving across school grounds. "When they traversed from one building to another part of the campus, we could stay in one logged-in environment, versus trying to log into two or three different areas to try to track them," Morgan says. "The new system has made a huge change in response, and a big impact on investigations." 

The new system offers integrated mapping that displays available cameras in a specific location. "Now [officers] can just look at a campus map, click on a building, see what cameras are there, and click on that camera to pull it up," Morgan adds. "So you don't have to memorize where the cameras go."

In two to three years, UCF plans to expand its inventory to more than 3,000 cameras, including a greater number at the new downtown campus, which will be managed on the Pivot3 platform. The university has a mix of cameras from Axis and Oncam Grandeye.

One area where security has recently expanded camera coverage is Spectrum Stadium, where the UCF Knights play football. "We work every football game, including tailgating leading up to the game and post-game, to make sure there are no incidents," Souza says. Recently, 43 additional cameras were placed in and around the stadium, which holds 45,000 people. 

The school partners with a company called CSC for event security at the football games. "When an incident happens, we're right on it with surveillance," he says. "We can do situational awareness, whether it's a fight or a medical incident. We're proactively monitoring the crowd for anything that's going on."

The last two years, UCF has played host to the Florida Cup, an international soccer tournament. Souza says the enhanced situational awareness is invaluable at that event. "It's a more excitable crowd, they are really excited about soccer, so they bring in the smoke bombs and get into fights in the parking lot, and fights in the stadium," he notes. 

UCF was also able to take full advantage of the upgraded cameras during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when then-Republican candidate Donald Trump visited campus, as well as then-President Barack Obama, who was campaigning for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. "We partnered with the U.S. Secret Service…we were also working with all of our law enforcement partners who worked with the candidates, helping them and giving them awareness of what was going on," Souza says. 

Access control. In addition to the video server and camera upgrades, the university wanted to enhance several aspects of its access control system, including provisioning and deprovisioning of cards. Souza is leading an effort with IT and human resources for granting and revoking card access for students, faculty, and staff. 

The campus is in the midst of a project to tie the HR directory to the access control system, "so we can have provisioning and deprovisioning of employees that ties them to their academic semesters, hiring and termination, or retirement of employees," Souza notes. 

Smart cards for students and faculty and card readers were also upgraded. "Our form of access control was magnetic stripe readers, now it's HID iClass" Souza says, which are contactless cards that are swiped in front of a door reader. "Not relying on magnetic stripe is a huge benefit."

The university has a contract guard force responsible for locking and unlocking buildings that are not automatically controlled. They also check to ensure the buildings that are automatically locked and unlocked are properly secured. 

Outlook. UCF has several ongoing security initiatives that it hopes to expand in the future, including its drone program, which was a major asset to the school during two recent hurricanes. UCF purchased a DJI Phantom Pro 4 drone and accessories, and used the vehicle to assess pre- and post-hurricane damage during Matthew in 2016 and Irma in 2017. The drone images were combined with data from cameras and access control systems to paint a holistic picture of how the storms affected the campus.

 "After the storm, we provided our facilities damage assessment team with immediate images of damages across all of our campuses, then flew drones the day after the storm to get high resolution images of the overall damage to buildings, as well as debris and fallen trees," Souza explains.

The school has a student intern, certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, who pilots the drone and trains others who seek certification. "We want to use drones for security and emergency management, but also use them safely and securely, with no privacy concerns being violated or safety issues with them crashing into people or things," Souza says. "We're reaching out to many different universities and public entities, drone companies, and drone detection companies to try to form a base on what drones for education programs looks like."

This spring, UCF finished renovating a media briefing room into its new global security operations center (GSOC). The security team actually rode out Hurricane Irma in 2017 in the center, before construction was finished. The school included the word "global" because security can keep track of students and faculty who participate in programs abroad. 

The GSOC has a large video wall that projects news, weather, pertinent alarms, and allows for control of digital signage across campus. There is also a conference room for briefings.

"We have the ability to track pinpoints on a map, track itineraries…and [use] a mass notification system to reach out to those students in whatever country for whatever incident may arise, whether it's a student that's sick, a large natural disaster, or terrorist attack," Souza notes.

Although the 2013 active shooter incident did not result in disaster for UCF, Morgan iterates that it spurred them on to make positive changes at the university, all of which ultimately strengthen its security posture. "We said, 'Okay, let's do what we need to do and be proactive–and let's try not to be reactive," Morgan says. "Now we have experts that can help us put the right solutions in the right places." 

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Reposted from Newsweek

The parents of a five-year-old boy have been hit with a $132,000 bill after their son knocked over a sculpture. 

CCTV footage of the incident last month shows the child appearing to reach out to the sculpture at the Tomahawk Ridge Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas. 

The boy, who was attending a wedding reception at the community center, according to CBS Local, appeared to attempt to prop up the art to stop it from falling, before it wobbled and hit the floor. 

Days later, the insurance company representing the city of Overland Park sent the family a $132,000 claim. They said the piece, entitled Aphrodite di Kansas City, was damaged beyond repair, ABC News reported.

The insurance letter stated: “You’re responsible for the supervision of a minor child[...] your failure to monitor could be considered negligent.”

Sarah Goodman, the child’s mother, told ABC News she was “offended” she was called negligent, and said the exhibition was treated “like a crime scene" after her son knocked over the sculpture. 

Artist Bill Lyons, who created the piece, told ABC News it was two years in the making, and was on sale for $132,000. He said it was beyond is “capabilities and desires” to mend it.

The boy’s parents argue the sculpture should have been better protected if it carried such a high price tag.

“It’s in the main walkway. Not a separate room. No plexiglass. Not protected. Not held down,” Goodman told KSHB.com. “There was no border around it. There wasn’t even a sign around it that said, ‘Do not touch.’”

Goodman told KSHB the bill is “completely astronomical.” Since the incident, her son has been having “bad dreams every night,” she said. 

The City of Oakland did not respond to a request for comment. Sean Reilly, a spokesperson with the City of Overland Park, told KSHB.com the piece was loaned to the city and there is a “societal responsibility” for visitors to understand art should not be interacted with unless otherwise stated. 

He told ABC News the community center has never had problems with artwork before. “We’ve not had this situation [...] we’ve not had kids climb on our pieces,” he said.

The family told KSHB they are now trying to work out how to foot the bill and may need to dip into their homeowners' insurance.

But the boy isn’t the first child to break an exhibit. In 2015, a boy believed to be around 5 years old smashed a 200 year old jug at the Christchurch Mansion in Suffolk, U.K. After museum staff fixed the jug, they launched a campaign to track him down and put him at ease.

Carole Jones, who was the head of Ipswich's museums at the time, told BBC News: "He was visiting the mansion with his family and this beautiful ancient puzzle jug was on quite a low window ledge.

"He knocked it off and it smashed into about 60 pieces. He was of course, absolutely devastated, and his family were really upset."

"We'd love them to visit again," she said.

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Reposted from ABC News

 Since the terror attacks that killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis on Nov. 13, 2015, the iconic tower has been under constant surveillance. French soldiers and policemen patrol the site 24 hours a day. But the company that operates the tower, SETE, said the site still needed more security.

"The square of the Eiffel Tower was still, at the time, accessible to anyone very easily," Bernard Gaudillere, SETE's president, told ABC News. "Therefore we decided to build a new perimeter around the Eiffel Tower to increase the security."

The new perimeter will be unveiled to the public next month. But ABC News was given access to the construction site for a preview. 

 Temporary barriers were set up around the 1063-foot tower in June 2016. They are now being replaced by permanent bulletproof glass walls on the northern and southern ends of the landmark, and by metal fences on the eastern and western sides. Visitors will have access to the Eiffel Tower through these fences.

"The two glass walls are 10 feet high," Gaudillere said of the new, permanent walls. "They are bulletproof and very solid."

He also said 420 blocks will also be installed in front of the glass walls to prevent a vehicle attack like the ones that have occurred in New York and across Europe. 

 The new security perimeter, which costs $40 million, will be completed and unveiled in July.

But critics, including people living in the neighborhood near the Eiffel Tower, say that the walls will drastically change the appearance of the landmark, making it look like a fortress. Jean-Sébastien Baschet, the president of an organization called Les Amis du Champ-de-Mars, said in a statement last year that the new perimeter would affect local residents' access to the gardens near the tower.

"The privatization of the gardens located right next to the Eiffel Tower is unacceptable and incompatible with the notion of cohabitation, which is very important to our neighborhood," Baschet said in a statement posted to the group's website in May 2017.

Baschet did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.

Others see the barriers as necessary to protect visitors.

"It will look much better than the temporary barriers that were installed two years ago, but most importantly, the security of our visitors will be increased, and this is our absolute priority," Alain Dumas, technical director for the Eiffel Tower operating company, told ABC News. 

 Gaudillere said the threat of terrorism at the tower is very real. In August 2017, a man with a knife tried to breach security at the Eiffel Tower. He was quickly surrounded and arrested on the scene by French police. No one was hurt in the incident but the tower was briefly evacuated.

After a difficult year in 2016 in which the numbers of visitors to the Eiffel Tower felt below 6 million people for the first time in 15 years, there has been a rebound.

In 2017, more tourists came back to the monument, Gaudillere said, adding: "We expect the upward trend to continue in 2018."

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Reposted from the Seattle Times

Sometimes it seems like this city of 17,000 just keeps taking the hits.

You can find Aberdeen listed right there, on a website called, “Encyclopedia of Forlorn Places,” alongside Butte, Montana, the Packard Plant in Detroit and other economically depressed places.

But the latest hit wasn’t about the economy, although Grays Harbor County still has a 7.2 percent unemployment rate, nearly 2½ times that of King County.

The hit came from a disastrous fire last week that burned thousands of irreplaceable artifacts from the area’s hardscrabble history.

And history matters here in this gritty town still reeling from the collapse of the logging industry, and where working-class families have lived for generations.

The fire Saturday gutted the Aberdeen Armory Building, dedicated in 1922 and touted as “a source of civic pride and activity.”

The cause of the fire remains under investigation, according to Aberdeen Fire Chief Tom Hubbard.

The two-story structure housed the Aberdeen Museum of History, a senior center and low-income assistance offices.

Dave Morris, the museum’s director, was on the way to work when he got the phone call. “The building is on fire!”

The flames were 20 or 30 feet high, he remembers. The billowing smoke reached the clouds, carrying away the ashes of thousands of historical items that fed the flames.

“We were totally helpless. All we could do was watch the fire progress and basically chew up the building,” he says.

The main floor of the museum, some 11,000 square feet, was the exhibit area.

“Gone. Gone,” says Morris when talking about those exhibits. It was a word that he repeated often.

For Nirvana fans, and on news sites, the main interest about the fire was that a display about Kurt Cobain was destroyed. The grunge superstar was born in Aberdeen and lived in the area into young adulthood.

The museum had become a stop for fans who sought to visit the places with some connection to Cobain.

But the T-shirts, drawings and memorabilia on display never actually belonged to Cobain.

The closest thing to an original Cobain artifact on display was a couch that the teenager slept on while staying for about a year in 1985 at the home of LaMont and Barbara Shillinger. They were the parents of a couple of Cobain’s friends at Aberdeen High.

Cobain would have been around 18 and had left his home after an argument with his mother, according to numerous accounts of his early years.

Morris said the couch — which looked like it would have fit in fine at some budget motel — wasn’t cordoned off, so fans could sit or lie down on it and pose for a photo.

“Gone,” says Morris.

Looking at the armory from the outside, it’s hard to imagine the devastation inside.

The white concrete walls are intact. The building, after all, was constructed as an armory, and over the years was used by 12 different National Guard companies and battalions.

But drone video of the fire posted on social media shows the roof collapsed and exposed an interior of charred beams and rubble.

A photo provided by the city’s fire department shows the museum’s main floor completely blackened by the fire. Blue sky shows through the building’s roof. The floor is littered with scorched lumber and rubble lying in puddles of water.

For Morris, one of the big losses in the fire was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer collection of “Hairbreadth Husky” cartoons by the late Bob McCausland. Hairbreadth was a ragged-looking dog with a punky attitude.

Beginning in 1959, Mc­Causland drew cartoons before and after each University of Washington football game, and garnered a devout following, including former UW coach Don James.

After retirement in 1981, McCausland moved to the area and drew cartoons for The Daily World in Aberdeen.

“Gone,” says Morris about the Hairbreadth cartoons.

He goes through the disastrous list.

“All the stuff from the unions. Gone,” he says. Until the collapse of logging, Aberdeen was a traditionally blue-collar town.

In 2016, Grays Harbor County went for Trump, the first time in 90 years that it hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.

But in the museum were the relics of how in the early 1900s, this area was at the heart of the Wobblies — the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

“Longshoremen, shingle weavers, sailors, and electrical workers all struck alongside the mill hands. The immediate cause of the conflict was the low wages paid at the Harbor’s mills,” recounts the UW’s IWW History Project about a historic 1912 strike.

Sawmill workers regularly lost fingers, hands and arms to the swirling saws.

Loggers knew they could easily lose their lives. One said that there were “49 different ways to get killed in the woods.”

And wages were so low that a visitor recounted, “I have seen children — sons and daughters of the working mill hands — come to the backyard of the hotel and pick old scraps of meat and bread from the garbage cans.”

The destroyed boxes of IWW items in storage at the museum were largely uncataloged, and so what was inside them isn’t known.

The list of items lost in the armory fire continues. Burned was a historical switchboard — the kind where the operator manually connected callers by plugging phone lines into the correct circuit.

Next to the switchboard was an old photo of a young woman working it. Now elderly, she regularly attended an exercise program at the armory.

All gone.

This week, both the state archives and Servpro, a fire and water cleanup and restoration company, have been lugging boxes out of the basement of the armory.

Photos and documents stored there are now under 4 feet of water from the firefighting efforts.

Even so, the damage could be worse, said Dann Sears, the museum’s archivist.

“Actually, we’re coming out pretty good on this,” he said.

Some paper materials that got wet have been frozen by Servpro, stopping any further damage. The next step is to put the paper in a chamber that turns the ice into a vapor.

The state archives was taking the heavily soaked and important materials. No vaporization chamber in this case; just simply hanging the stuff on clothes lines in a room set to 50 to 60 degrees and 50 to 60 percent humidity. It works.

The museum was insured for “replacement value of building and contents,” says Aberdeen Mayor Erik Larson.

But how much monetary value to put on that old Kurt Cobain couch? Or the Hairbreadth Husky originals?

“That’s going to be the difficult part,” says Larson.

Devastating fires are part of Aberdeen’s history.

In 1903, a fire destroyed 140 buildings in the center of town.

The Great Fire of 1918 that again destroyed most of the buildings in town.

In 2002 a couple of kids set fire to the landmark Weatherwax Building on the old campus for the high school.

On the museum’s Facebook page, a woman posted, “The museum will rise again!”

You get knocked down, you just get up again, that’s the Aberdeen way.

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Reposted from the Toronto Star

It’s almost the stuff of comedy: A man wearing a dark jacket, pulled high to mask his face, slips unperturbed into an empty gallery, lifts a $45,000 Banksy print from the wall and strides almost casually out the same door he came in.

There was nothing urgent about the early-Sunday-morning theft, and why would there be? If not for the security cameras, it would have been the perfect crime, and not for any particular skill by the thief. Bright lights, an unlocked door and not another soul to be seen made “The Art of Banksy” — displaying some $35 million worth of the British street artist’s work on Toronto’s Sterling Road — about as forbidding as an all-night bus station.

Of course, bus-station standards are hardly sufficient for an art exhibition, said Steven Keller, a museum security expert based in Florida.

“Art exhibition security is somewhat unique in that instead of putting the valuable assets in a safe at night, we hang them on walls,” said Keller, whose Architect’s Security Group is the largest museum security consulting group in North America, and has worked with Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum. “Therefore, the building they are displayed in has to be well protected. Every access or egress point should have been staffed or alarmed, someone leaving with a picture should have been seen, and the item they were carrying examined.”

“If they left by a fire exit door, they should have been observed by CCTV and an alarm generated,” he added. “Someone should have been close enough by to respond. Obviously, none of this happened.”

Keller, who watched the now-famous security footage online, said such out-in-the-open displays of valuable material require alarm systems that “far exceed” the needs of virtually all other kinds of facilities. His security company, he says, “provides CCTV which is monitored and not just recorded, which apparently wasn’t the case in the Toronto Banksy theft, where no one intervened when they should have.”

This is the question of the moment: How could so much valuable art be left unmanned, unobserved and, apparently, unlocked? Toronto Police Services doesn’t appear to have gotten that far with its investigation. (An officer at the communications branch said he had “no idea” what was being investigated; the lead investigator on the case is off duty until next week, the communications desk said.)

Meanwhile, LiveNation and Starvox, the event-promotion companies that brought the show to town, haven’t had much to say either — a brief statement Thursday simply noted that the artwork, a print called Trolley Hunters valued at $45,000, “went missing during setup.” They’ve declined further comment, though they confirmed through a spokesperson that 213 Sterling Rd. did have at least one security guard on duty at the time.

The theft occurred at 5 a.m. on Sunday, three days before the opening of the blockbuster exhibition. Toronto police released the surveillance footage on Thursday. And so far, the thief remains as anonymous as the artist whose work he ripped off. 

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Reposted from Artnet.com

The cost could be more than $132 million, if "the Mac" is reconstructed after a second fire leaves the historic building a ruin.

Fire fighters have fought a blaze for the second time in four years at the Glasgow School of Art’s historic Mackintosh building. This time the destruction is far worse: construction experts fear that the shell of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s landmark building will have to be torn down as much of it is in danger of collapse. To rebuild “the Mac,” as it is known, could cost at least £100 million ($132 million), the Scotsman newspaper reports, “or double that,” according to Bill Hare, a professor of construction management at Glasgow Caledonian University.

The devastating fire broke out late on Friday night at the Scottish art school. Around 120 firefighters tackled the blaze, which has left the building a smoldering ruin. The fire spread with rapid intensity, damaging the Campus nightclub next door as well as the O2 ABC music venue. There were no casualties. The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, visited the site and called the fire “heartbreaking.” She is reported to have said that the Scottish Government is ready to “do anything we reasonably can to help ensure that the building has a future.”

The fire in the art school started just as a £35 million ($46 million) project to restore the Art Nouveau building was nearing completion after a fire had destroyed the school’s Mackintosh-designed library in 2014. A sprinkler system was being installed as part of the restoration work. The 2014 fire was started accidentally by an art student’s project, when gases from a foam canister were inadvertently ignited. The cause of the second fire is being investigated.

One of the oldest art schools in the UK, Glasgow’s alumni include Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling, and Jenny Saville. It has produced eight Turner prize nominees and two winners: Gordon and Starling. There has been an outpouring of empathy from the art world in response to the fire. Scottish painter and former alumni Alison Watt took to Twitter among many other notable graduates. “My heart is breaking,” she wrote. “I just can’t watch the footage of Glasgow School of Art in flames. I feel physical pain. It’s unbearable…”

In 2014, the US architect Steven Holl completed a new building for Glasgow’s celebrated art school. Known as the Reid, it is across the street from “the Mack,” and escaped damage by the weekend’s fire.

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Reposted from the Evening Standard

A £1 million painting stolen six years ago has been returned to its owners after it was discovered under a drug dealer's bed.

The work, by Sir Stanley Spencer and titled Cookham from Englefield, was taken from the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Berkshire, in 2012.

Its whereabouts remained a mystery until police arrested Harry Fisher, 28, in June last year after finding a kilogram of cocaine and £30,000 in cash in his Mercedes.

Officers discovered the artwork under a bed next to three kilograms of cocaine and 15,000 ecstasy tablets when they searched his flat in Kingston-upon-Thames, west London.

A further raid on his family home in Fulham found more Class A drugs, making a total street value of £450,000, and £40,000 in cash.

Fisher was jailed for eight years and eight months at Kingston Crown Court in October, having pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs, acquiring criminal property and handling stolen goods, Scotland Yard said.

His passenger at the time of arrest, Zak Lal, 32, of Rochester, Kent, was jailed for five years and eight months after admitting conspiracy to supply Class A drugs, acquiring criminal property and possession of an offensive weapon, police said.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said the painting's owners, who were "devastated" at the loss, were finally reunited with the artwork last month.

Arts Minister Michael Ellis said: "Spencer is one our most renowned painters and a true great of the 20th century. It is wonderful that this story has had a happy ending and the painting has been returned to its rightful owners."

Detective Constable Sophie Hayes, of the Metropolitan Police's art and antiques unit, said: "The art and antiques unit was delighted to assist with the recovery and return of this important painting.

"The circumstances of its recovery underline the links between cultural heritage crime and wider criminality.

"The fact that the painting was stolen five years before it was recovered did not hinder a prosecution for handling stolen goods, demonstrating the Met will pursue these matters wherever possible, no matter how much time has elapsed."

Described by the Stanley Spencer Gallery gallery as one of "our greatest British artists", Sir Stanley often used the Berkshire village of Cookham as inspiration for his work during a 45-year career.

He died in 1959.

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Reposted from WAVE3 News

After a three alarm fire on Wednesday, clean up crews continued to repair damage at the Kentucky Center on Thursday.

The main issue inside of the building was water damage in the lobby, according to Kentucky Center spokesman Christian Adelberg.

Kim Baker, President of the Center, says the theaters were not affected like the lobby, just some water seeped under the doors. 

It's the water damage in the lobby that has caused some concern over the $18 million worth of art located there.

Adelberg said the pieces were already covered to protect them during the ceiling work.

Baker says the only piece they are worried about is the “The Coloured Gates of Louisville” by John Chamberlain. The piece took on some extensive water damage on the wall of the Bomhard theater. To protect the rest of the art from fluctuating temperatures as the building dries out, the center enlisted the help of the Speed Art Museum.

Most of the performances scheduled for this weekend have been relocated. 

Right now, the box office is closed to the public but tickets still available online.

The Broadway hit musical, Waitress, was scheduled for June 26. Broadway Louisville tweeted the show should go on as planned.

It is unknown when the center will be open again. 

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Reposted from CNBC

A cyberattack of devastating proportions is not a matter of if, but when, numerous security experts believe.

And the scale of it, one information security specialist said this week, will be such that it will have its own name — like Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

"The more I speak to people, the more they think that the next Pearl Harbor is going to be a cyberattack," cybersecurity executive and professional hacker Tarah Wheeler told a panel audience during the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) annual forum in Paris.

"I think that the most horrifying cybersecurity attack is going to have its own name and I think it's going to involve something more terrifying than we've thought of yet."

Wheeler is CEO and principal security advisor at Red Queen Technologies, a cybersecurity fellow at Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America, and former cybersecurity czar at multinational software firm Symantec.

Explaining her premonition, Wheeler pointed to vital health and transport infrastructure she described as grossly under-protected.

"I think about the fact that most American healthcare technology is secured, if at all, with ancient, crumbling security infrastructure. I think of planes full of people, the kind of infrastructure that protects flu vaccinations. I think about fertility clinics losing years' worth of viable embryos," she said, stressing that people are not paying attention to that crumbling infrastructure.

Critical infrastructure and industry

Wheeler is not alone in her apocalyptic outlook. Not a single report from technology companies and researchers in this field claims that the cyberthreat environment is becoming less hostile or less significant.

The World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Risks Report 2018 names cyberattacks and cyber warfare as a top cause of disruption in the next five years, coming only after natural disasters and extreme weather events.

"In a worst-case scenario, attackers could trigger a breakdown in the systems that keep societies functioning," the report said. Industry and critical infrastructure like power grids and water purification systems could be potential targets for hackers, whether they are small groups or state actors.

Retired Admiral James Stavridis, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, echoed these warnings in a prior interview with CNBC: "We're headed toward a cyber Pearl Harbor, and it is going to come at either the grid or the financial sector... we need to think about this cyberattack as a pandemic."

Artificial intelligence-focused security firm BluVector reported in February that almost 40 percent of all industrial control systems and critical infrastructure faced a cyberattack at some point in the second half of 2017.

Unpatchable devices and the internet of things

Companies and governments aren't doing enough to protect these systems, Wheeler said.

"The inevitability is based in the easy access to the kinds of exploits that still work 10, 15, 20 years after they've been revealed," she said, noting that there are still companies running critical infrastructure, including health infrastructure, on Windows XP and other platforms that are unpatchable — meaning they can't be updated for vulnerability and bug fixes. Many internet of things (IOT) devices, she described, are unpatchable by design.

IOT, which has been described as "merging physical and virtual worlds, creating smart environments" through devices connected to the internet and that communicate with one another, represents a whole new level of vulnerabilities.

And cybercriminals have an exponentially increasing number of potential targets, the WEF report said, "because the use of cloud services continues to accelerate and the internet of things is expected to expand from an estimated 8.4 billion devices in 2017 to a projected 20.4 billion in 2020."

The chief executive of defense firm Raytheon International, John Harris, recently called cyberattacks the "single biggest threat to global security," adding that "the more we are connected, the more we are vulnerable."

Listen to the hackers

But Wheeler didn't specify who would likely be behind such acts, stressing that the nature of cyber warfare is asymmetric — and while there are state actors with hostile intentions, cyber weapons are accessible to just about anyone with the skills to deploy them.

What's needed, Wheeler stressed, is "sensible, deep, not broad, cybersecurity regulation that has teeth." She urged the private sector to listen to its "early warning system" — what she called the information security community, or hackers — rather than criminalizing their activity.

Industry experts have encouraged best practices and a greater awareness of the threats across the public and private sectors, and call on both sides to improve collaboration.

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Reposted from ArtNet

London’s Hayward Gallery has been forced to close on the opening day of a major solo show dedicated to the South Korean artist Lee Bul. One of her works caught fire yesterday, forcing the private view of the exhibition “Lee Bul: Crashing,” to be called off. 

“During an incident yesterday, an artwork caught fire in a contained space within the Hayward Gallery which required attendance from the fire brigade,” a spokesperson for the gallery confirmed to artnet News.

The artist and the museum decided together to remove the artist’s work Majestic Splendor (1991–97) from the exhibition for safety purposes ahead of the opening, but a small fire broke out during the de-installation. While the press preview yesterday morning went ahead, the evening opening was canceled at the last minute. 

This isn’t the first time the work, which comprises a fish decked out in sequins, has caused trouble. The smell of Majestic Splendor made visitors to Bul’s 1997 show at the Museum of Modern Art so nauseous that it had to be removed. To avoid the same problem, the fish have since been placed in a sealed plastic bag with the chemical potassium permanganate. But the presence of the chemical increased the chances that other already flammable materials would catch fire.

“Superficial damage was sustained in a confined section of Gallery 1,” the spokesperson said, explaining that the gallery will remain closed today and tomorrow to deal with “remedial cosmetic work.” Staff anticipate reopening on Friday, June 1, to inaugurate the show, which will run through Hayward’s 50th anniversary in July and close August 19.

One security contractor was assessed for the effects of smoke inhalation as a precaution in the wake of the blaze, the spokesperson said.

The Hayward reopened its space in London’s Southbank Centre at the end of January after a two-year closure for refurbishment. For its latest show, Lee has taken over the gallery’s expansive space with more than 100 works spanning the late ‘80s to the present. The show includes installation, painting, and performance, transforming the space into a futuristic landscape replete with alien bodies, cyborgs and Kusama-like mirrored environments.

The artist’s work recalls everything from science fiction stories to Korea’s own quickfire urban development and presents an environment teetering on the edge dystopia. Indeed, the fire broke out among a number of depicted disaster experiences that include a monumental foil Zeppelin, Willing To Be Vulnerable – Metalized Balloon (2015–16), that references the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, and a new sculptural work, Scale of Tongue (2017–18), which references the sinking of the Sewol Ferry in 2014, an event that left 304 people dead.

Lee received an honorable mention at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 for her contributions to the Korean Pavilion and Harald Szeemann’s international exhibition. She later received the Noon Award for established artists making experimental work at the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014.

“Lee Bul: Crashing” is on at London’s Hayward Gallery from May 30 through August 19.

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