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3A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2016 New York irm gets $1 million contract to review ODOT By PARIS ACHEN Capital Bureau SALEM — The state has awarded a nearly $1 million contract to New York-based McK- insey & Co. to conduct a long-awaited man- agement review of the Oregon Department of Transportation before lawmakers approve a transportation package in 2017. State oficials in late July nixed a previ- ous contract with John L. Craig after revela- tions about his close ties with ODOT and an unearthed email showing he had sought to replace the agency’s director. Lawmakers have said they want an inde- pendent, third party review to ensure the department is operating eficiently before they approve a transportation package in 2017. That legislation — one of Gov. Kate Brown’s priorities as governor — could hike gas taxes and fees on drivers and fun- nel hundreds of millions of dollars in addi- tional funding to the agency. In an effort to get a review inished in time for the 2017 session, the Depart- ment of Administrative Services launched an emergency process for selecting a new contractor. Brown selected McKinsey based on the recommendations of a state procurement team, said Bryan Hockaday, a press secre- tary in Brown’s ofice. “McKinsey had the most responsive pro- posal, and they are a national company recom- mended for their expertise,” Hockaday said. Lyra Fontaine/The Daily Astorian Dalin D’Alessandro from Portland State University and Tiffany Boothe from the Seaside Aquarium take measurements of the dead whale at Oswald West State Park. Researchers examine dead whale By LYRA FONTAINE The Daily Astorian ARCH CAPE — Slightly north of the surfers and hik- ers, a small team from the Sea- side Aquarium and Portland State University examined the remains of a whale at Oswald West State Park Thursday morning. Curious passers-by stopped to take pictures and ask questions. The dead humpback washed ashore at the state park’s Short Sand beach on Tuesday. It orig- inally beached in nearby Arch Cape on Friday, before washing back out to sea. The team hopes to ind some clues as to why the whale died, which may be challeng- ing. Keith Chandler, the general manager of the Seaside Aquar- ium, said most of the whale’s internal organs are gone after it blew up, and it has been dead for a while. Portland State Univer- sity biology research assis- tant Dalin D’Alessandro and Seaside Aquarium employ- ees Tiffany Boothe and Mollie Schmidt measured the whale and will take blubber and skin samples. “We are looking for external signs of trauma and entangle- ment and possible hemorrhage by cutting through the blub- ber layer,” D’Alessandro said, adding that they are examin- ing exposed parts of the whale, conducting a “limited nec- ropsy” due to not having heavy equipment. The whale is about 38 feet long and is missing its tail. “Its tail was severed by something, probably after it was already dead,” Chandler said. Oswald West State Park will likely be its inal resting place, since the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department has decided to leave the whale and let nature take its course. How- ever, when larger storms hit the coast over the next months or weeks, what’s left of the mam- mal could wash back out to sea, Boothe said. It may take longer to decay in cooler weather. State park staff will provide educa- tional talks about the whale at 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. McKinsey has 25 days to deliver its work plan for the review and until the end of Feb- ruary to submit a inal product, Hockaday said. The state reached out to several irms with experience in management reviews and received proposals from McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, Hockaday said. Craig, who won the original $350,000 contract to do the review, oversaw the agen- cy’s $1.3 billion outsourced bridge repair and replacement program for six years. He stepped down as program manager of Ore- gon Bridge Development Partners just 15 months ago. After questions arose whether Craig’s connections with ODOT employees pre- sented a conlict of interest, a transporta- tion commissioner dug up an old email from Craig in which he appeared to be seeking agency Director Matt Garrett’s job. Tammy Baney, chairwoman of the Ore- gon Transportation Commission, received the job solicitation email from Craig in January. She said she didn’t read the entirety of its contents until after Craig landed the contract for the ODOT review, when she recalled he had previously reached out to her. After reading the email in July, she recommended that state oficials revoke his contract. The Capital Bureau is a collaboration between EO Media Group and Pamplin Media Group. Big email hack doesn’t exactly send the message Yahoo needed By MICHAEL LIEDTKE Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo has been struggling for years to keep people coming back to its digital services such as email. That challenge just got more daunting after hack- ers stole sensitive informa- tion from at least 500 million accounts. The startling breach dis- closed Thursday is believed to be the largest to hit a single email provider. The security break- down risks magnifying Yahoo’s preexisting problems — specii- cally, that it is losing users, traf- ic and the advertising revenue that follows both, to rivals such as Google and Facebook. Some snarky online com- mentators quipped that the hack would have been far more devastating if people actually still used the company’s ser- vices. While there’s some truth to that observation, millions around the world still rely on Yahoo mail and other services, and are now potentially at risk of identity theft or worse. Losing users And if these people give up on Yahoo as a result, the consequences for the com- pany itself — now scheduled to become part of Verizon as soon as its $4.8 billion deal closes — could also be dire. “Yahoo may very well be fac- ing an existential crisis,” said Corey Williams, senior direc- tor of products and marketing at the computer security irm Centrify. Yahoo was already facing a steep decline in email traf- ic, despite CEO Marissa May- er’s efforts to upgrade the ser- vice in order to foster more user loyalty. In July, 161 mil- lion people worldwide used Yahoo email on personal com- puters, a 30 percent decline from the same time in 2014, when the breach irst occurred. That’s according to the lat- est data from the research irm comScore. By contrast, Goo- gle’s rival Gmail service saw desktop users rise 9 percent to nearly 429 million over the same period. The email breach raises questions about Yahoo’s abil- ity to maintain secure and effective services, particu- larly since it’s been laying off staff and trimming expenses to counter a steep drop in revenue over the past eight years. At the time of the break-in, Yahoo’s security team was led by Alex Stamos, a respected industry executive who left last year to take a similar job at Facebook. Once more unto the breach Yahoo didn’t explain what took so long to uncover a heist that it blamed on a “state-spon- sored actor” — parlance for a hacker working on behalf of a foreign government. The Sunnyvale, Califor- nia, company declined to explain how it reached its con- clusions about the attack for security reasons, but said it is working with the FBI and other law enforcement. Yahoo began investigating a possi- ble breach in July, around the time the tech site Motherboard reported that a hacker who uses the name “Peace” was trying to sell account informa- tion belonging to 200 million Yahoo users. Yahoo didn’t ind evidence of that reported hack, but addi- tional digging later uncov- ered a far larger, allegedly state-sponsored attack. “We take these types of breaches very seriously and will determine how this occurred and who is responsi- ble,” the FBI said in a Thurs- day statement. although it hasn’t disclosed how many of those people have email accounts. The data stolen from Yahoo includes users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, scrambled pass- words, and the security ques- tions — and answers — used to verify an accountholder’s identity. The company said the attacker didn’t get any infor- mation about its users’ bank accounts or credit and debit cards. Security experts say the Yahoo theft could hurt the affected users if their personal information is mined to break into other online services or used for identity theft. All affected users will be notiied about the theft and advised how to protect themselves, according to the company. ll Ca ime yt n A Yahoo also is recommend- ing that all users change their passwords if they haven’t done so since 2014. If the same pass- word is used to access other sites, it should be changed too, as should any security ques- tions similar to those used on Yahoo. The Verizon impact News of the security lapse could cause some peo- ple to have second thoughts about relying on Yahoo’s services, raising a prickly issue for the company as it tries to sell its digital opera- tions to Verizon. That deal, announced two months ago, isn’t supposed to close until early next year. That leaves Verizon with wig- gle room to renegotiate the purchase price or even back out if it believes the secu- rity breach will harm Yahoo’s business. That could happen if users shun Yahoo or ile law- suits because they’re incensed by the theft of their personal information. Verizon said it still doesn’t know enough about the Yahoo break-in to assess the poten- tial consequences. “We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, custom- ers, shareholders and related communities,” the company said in a statement. Delay of sale? At the very least, Verizon is going to need more time to assess what it will be get- ting into if it proceeds with its plans to take over Yahoo, said Scott Vernick, an attor- ney specializing in data secu- rity for the law irm Fox Rothschild. “This is going to slow things down. 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