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2021 Cybersecurity and IT Failures Roundup


Lessons learned from the many failures,
interruptions, crimes and other IT-related setbacks
that made the news in 2020
BY ROBERT N. CHARETTE
06 JAN 2021 13 MIN READ

ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO

  
TAGS

SECURITY NETWORKS COMPUTING FAILURES SOLARWINDS ATTACK IT FAILURES IT

CYBERSECURITY

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The pandemic year just passed once again demonstrates that IT-
related failures are universally unprejudiced. Companies large and
small, sectors private and public, reputations stellar and scorned:
none are exempt. Herewith, the failures, interruptions, crimes and
other IT-related setbacks that made the news in 2020.

Aviation

Automakers

Cloud Computing

Communications

Cybercrime

Financial Institutions and Markets

Government IT

Health IT

Policing

Rail Transport

Aviation: The Year Without Airline Grinches (Almost)

Over the past several years, airline flight delays and


cancellations [PDF] related to IT issues have averaged about one
per month. The year 2020 kicked off with “technical issues”
affecting British Airways’ computerized check-in at
London’s Heathrow Airport, which caused more than 100 flight
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London s Heathrow Airport,
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which caused more than 100 flight
2021 Cybersecurity and IT Failures Roundup - IEEE Spectrum

cancellations with numerous others being delayed. The


outage impacted at least 10,000 passengers’ travel plans over two
days in February. Then in March, as Covid-19 related government
travel bans started to take hold, Delta Air Lines reported,
“intermittent technical difficulties” for bookings and ticket changes.

Once the travel bans firmly took hold and flying trimmed back to a
minimum, however, there has not been a major IT outage reported
since Delta’s. I suspect this hiatus will not last long, as airline flight
schedules start returning closer to some semblance of “normal,”
perhaps (here’s hoping!) later this year.

Probably the biggest airline IT-related news of the year is the U.S.
Federal Aviation Administration’s announcement that the Boeing
737 Max 8 aircraft can resume passenger service once a number of
changes [PDF] are made. This may take up to a year to complete
for all 450 aircraft that were grounded. The FAA Airworthiness
Directive requires “installing new flight control computer (FCC)
software, revising the existing [Airplane Flight Manual] to
incorporate new and revised flight crew procedures, installing new
MAX display system (MDS) software, changing the horizontal
stabilizer trim wire routing installations, completing an angle of
attack (AOA) sensor system test, and performing an operational
readiness flight.” While both Brazil’s and European Union’s
country’s civil aviation administration organizations have given
their approval for the 737 Max to return to flight, some others like
Canada’s, may mandate that additional requirements be met.

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Boeing’s myriad problems with the Max 8’s software


(itself attributed to the crashes of both Lion Air
JT610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302) can be reviewed in both
the June FAA Inspector General’s report as well as the final
report of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and
Infrastructure investigation. (See also software executive and
airplane enthusiast Gregory Travis’s comprehensive 2019 analysis
of the 737 Max fiasco for Spectrum.) Whether Boeing or the airlines
can convince the public to board the Max remains to be seen, even
with American Airlines beginning flights with the aircraft in late
December.

Automakers: Software Potholes

Software and electronic-related recalls show no signs of slowing


from their 2019 record levels. The year started off with GM issuing
a second software recall to remedy problems caused by its first
software recall issued in December 2019. The original recall and its
software fix were aimed at correcting an error that could disable
463,995 2019 Chevrolet Silverado, GMC Sierra and Cadillac CT6
vehicles’ electronic stability control or antilock brake systems
without warnings appearing on the dashboard. Unfortunately, the
update was flawed. If an owner remotely started their vehicle
using GM’s OnStar app, the brakes were disabled—although
warnings were shown on the dash. About 162,000 vehicles received
the original fix. The new software update seems to have done the
trick.

Both Hyundai and Kia Motors, which Hyundai owns a 34% stake
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in, issued a number of recalls in 2020 involving moisture problems


involving electronic circuits that could cause vehicle fires. Owners
of many of the vehicles involved were warned to park their vehicles
outside until the repairs were made. Hyundai also had to issue
a recall to update its Remote Smart Parking Assistant software for
the 2020 Sonata and Nexo models. A software error could allow a
vehicle to continue moving after a system malfunction.

Other auto manufacturers had their share of recalls as well. Fiat


Chrysler Automobiles recalled 318,537 2019 and 2020 cars and
trucks because a software error could allow the backup camera to
stay on when a vehicle is moving forward. Toyota recalled 700,000
Prius and Prius V models for a software problem that would
prevent the cars from entering a failsafe driving mode as intended,
while 735,000 Honda Motors 2018-2020 Accord and 2019-2020
Insight vehicles were recalled for software updates to its Body
Control Module to prevent the malfunction of one or more
electronic components including the rear-view camera display, turn
signals and windshield wipers. Volkswagen had to slip its rollout of
its new all-electric ID.3 models by several months due to software
issues.

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Given the increasing amount and importance of vehicle software,


Toyota launched two new software companies in July under an
umbrella company called Woven Planet Holdings to increase the
capability and reliability of its vehicles’
automation. Volkswagen created its own software business unit in
2019. Meanwhile, GM announced in November that it would hire
another 3,000 workers before the end of the first quarter of 2021 to
increase its engineering and software development capabilities.

Cloud Computing: Intermittent Showers

While cloud computing is generally reliable, when it is not, the


impacts can be widespread and consequential, especially when so
many people working or schooling from home. This truism was
highlighted by several cloud computing outages this year. In
March, Microsoft Azure experienced a six-hour
outage attributed to a cooling system failure and another caused by
VM capacity constraints. The same month, Google Cloud went
down for about 90 minutes, which was ascribed to issues with
infrastructure components. In April, GitHub (owned by Microsoft)
experienced several disruptions related to multiple different system
misconfiguration issues. In June, the IBM Cloud went down for
over three hours due to problems linked to an external network
provider—and once more later in the month, this time with little
explanation. Amazon’s East Region U.S. AWS center suffered
disruptions for over six hours in November for a large number of
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clients, from Adobe to Roku to The Wall Street Journal, that


was caused by an operating system configuration issue. Multiple
Google Cloud services suffered back to back service disruptions in
December, the first that lasted for about an hour and affected
Gmail, Google Classroom, Nest, and YouTube, among others. The
outage was blamed on storage issues with Google’s authentication
system. The second unscheduled downtime affected Gmail
for nearly seven hours. An email configuration update issue was the
culprit this time.

Communications: Hello? Hello? Anyone There?

Recurrent communication problems continued throughout 2020.


Several emergency service systems went offline,
including Arizona’s 911 system in June that left 1 million people
without service. Hampshire, England’s £39m new 999-
system collapsed in July. Meanwhile, September saw 911 outages
across 14 states for about an hour.

T-Mobile wireless services, the second largest in the U.S.,


were unavailable to many of its customers for nearly 12 hours after
the introduction of a new network router in June, causing 250
million nation-wide calls and 23,621 emergency calls to 911 in
several states not to connect. Vodafone in Germany
experienced equipment failure that kept 100,000 mobile phone
users from making calls for three hours in November.

Disruptions also hit users of the Internet. In May, users of the


videoconferencing platform Zoom across the globe experienced
trouble logging into their meetings for about two hours, messaging
platform Slack suffered an outage for nearly three hours,
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,
while Adobe Creative Cloud users were locked out for most of a
day. A configuration error in Internet service
company Cloudfare’s backbone network disrupted world-wide
online services for about an hour in July. Then in August, Internet
service provider CenturyLink went down, taking dozens of online
services and a big chunk of world-wide Internet traffic down with
it, while in Australia, a DNS issue affected Telstra’s Internet service
for a few hours. In September, a problem with Microsoft’s Azure
Active Directory kept users in the North America from
their Microsoft Office 365 accounts and other services for five
hours, while in October, a network infrastructure update issue
again caused difficulties for North American Microsoft Office 365
and other service users for over four hours. And in December,
Google suffered consecutive day outages. The first was caused by
an internal administrative system storage issue and affected more
than a dozen Google services, including Docs, Gmail, Nest,
YouTube and its cloud services for about an hour. The next day,
Gmail services were down for up to four hours by an email
configuration issue.

Social media companies suffered their own outages, like Spotify


and Tinder (caused by a Facebook issue) in July, Twitter
in February and again in October, as well as Facebook across
Europe in December.

Cybercrime: The Targets and Costs Increase

The number of records exposed by data breaches and especially


unsecured databases continues to skyrocket, with at least 36 billion
records exposed as of the end of September 2020. While the
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number of data breaches seems to have gone down, the number of


large unsecured databases discovered seems to be
climbing. StealthLabs has a comprehensive compilation of 25 major
data breaches by month.

Ransomware attacks increased significantly in 2020, especially


targeting governmental, educational and hospital systems. Typical
were the attacks against the City of Pensacola, Florida,
the University of Utah, and the University of Vermont Medical
Center. Businesses have not been immune either, with ransomware
woes plaguing the likes of electronic company Foxconn, hospital
and healthcare services company Universal Health Services, and
cybersecurity company Cygilant.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets


Control issued a five-page advisory [PDF] in October warning
against paying ransomware demands, stating that it not only
encourages more attacks, but it also may run afoul of OFAC
regulations and result in civil penalties. Whether the advisory has
any impact remains to be seen. Delaware County,
Pennsylvania agreed to pay a $500,000 ransom in December, for
example.

Nation-state sponsored intrusions have also been prevalent in


2020, such as those against Israel and the UAE. The Russia-
attributed “SolarWinds” attack against the U.S. that was
initially disclosed in December and then developed into a bigger
story has especially caused alarm, with the amount of damage still
being unraveled.

In light of how often ransomware attacks are initiated by phishing10/34


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In light of how often ransomware attacks are initiated by phishing
emails, government agencies and corporations have increased their
employee phishing-training, including the use of phishing tests
using mock phishing emails and websites. These tests frequently
use the same information contained in real phishing emails as a
template in order to see how their employees respond.
Unfortunately, some of these tests have backfired, causing undue
panic or rage among employees as a result. Both Tribune
Publishing Co. and GoDaddy recently found out about the latter
when their tests were less than well thought out.

Financial Institutions and Markets: Trading Will Resume


Tomorrow

The year saw the continuation of bank outages in the UK beginning


on New Year’s Day with millions of customers of Lloyds Banking
Group unable to access online and mobile banking services. A few
days later, computer problems at Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks
kept wages and other payments from reaching customer accounts.
Lloyds had another online problem in June, and other UK banks
like Santander, NatWest, and Barclays experienced their own IT
problems in late summer.

Other notable bank IT problems involved U.S. Chase Bank, where


“technical issues” created incorrect customer balances in June
and Nigerian First City Monument Bank, where up to 5.1 million
customers had trouble accessing their online accounts for four days
in July. Also in July, Australian Commonwealth
Bank customers suffered a nine-hour online and banking outage,
while National Australia Bank customers experienced a similar
situation in October. A power outage at a data center took out
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India’s HDFC Bank, which interrupted its services for two days in
November. HDFC’s November outage, along with previous
incidents, caused the Reserve Bank of India in December to require
HDFC to slow down its modernization efforts to ensure that its
banking infrastructure was sufficiently reliable and resilient.

IT problems at stock exchanges and trading platforms have been


especially abundant this past year. In February, a hardware
error halted trading at the Toronto Stock Exchange for two hours in
February, while a software issue caused the Moscow
Exchange to suspend trading for 42 minutes in May. Then in July,
stock exchanges in Frankfurt, Vienna, Ljubljana, Prague, Budapest,
Zagreb, Malta and Sofia were offline for three hours because of a
“technical issue” with the German electronic trading platform
Xetra T7 system that each exchange used. In October, a technical
issue in third-party middleware software was blamed for
the trading halt on Euronext exchanges in Amsterdam, Brussels,
Dublin, Lisbon and Portugal. The same month, a hardware failure
and subsequent failure of the back-up system took down the Tokyo
Stock Exchange for a whole day, the worst electronic outage ever
experienced. The problems led to the resignation of TSE Chief
Executive Officer Koichiro Miyahara. In November, a software
issue caused trading to be suspended on the Australian Stock
Exchange for nearly the entire day, its worst outage in more than a
decade.

Trading platforms also experienced numerous IT problems. In


March, the trading platform Robinhood faced, according to the
company’s founders, “stress on our infrastructure.” That
stress resulted in three outages in the space of one week, alongside
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others in June, August, November and December. J.P.
Morgan endured a trading platform problem in March,
while Charles Schwab, E-Trade, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, TD
Ameritrade, and Vanguard all had trading system technical
issues of their own in November. Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD
Ameritade, and Interactive Brokers Group joined Robinhood
with more outages in December as well.

Government IT: Anyone know COBOL?

The pandemic highlighted the dependence of governments


everywhere on legacy IT systems, particularly in regard to state
unemployment systems. The rapid increase in demand for
unemployment benefits and the changes in the amount of benefits
paid coupled with the inability to reprogram quickly the benefit
systems affected unemployment systems
in California, Oregon and Washington State especially hard. On the
other hand, nearly every state experienced technical problems,
including rampant fraud. Computer issues also affected the Internal
Revenue Services ability to send out Congressional approved
stimulus checks in April as well.

Legacy IT system worries did not just affect the United States. In
February, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau received a
report warning that many mission-critical systems were “rusting
out and at risk of failure.” Japan’s government pledged in June to
modernize its administrative systems, which were criticized for
being “behind the world by at least 20 years.” South Korea’s
government also promised in June to accelerate its transition to a
digital economy.
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While unemployment system problems dominated government


system woes, there were others in the news as well.
Pittsburgh’s new state of the art employee payroll system had
an inauspicious start at the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile, Ohio’s Cuyahoga County is still awaiting its new $35
million computer system, which is $10 million over budget and
already two years late. It may be ready by 2022.

Pay issues involving the infamous Canadian Phoenix government


payroll system that went live in 2016 continue to be resolved, with
its replacement moving to early testing likely next year.
Unfortunately, there still is no resolution to those tens of thousands
of innocent unemployed Michigan workers falsely accused of
employment fraud by Michigan’s Integrated Data Automated
System (MiDAS) between October 2013 and September 2015. The
state has been forcefully fighting without success to quash a class-
action lawsuit for compensation; the case is now with the
Michigan’s Supreme Court again for hopefully a final resolution in
2021. Finally, a review of Ohio’s $1.2 billion benefits system that
went live in 2013 was still riddled with 1,100 defects and
was partially responsible for up to $455 million in benefit
overpayments and 24,000 backlog cases in the past year.

Health IT

Medicine’s shift to electronic health records continues to be a


bumpy one. In January, the UK government pledged to provide £40
million to streamline logging into National Health Service IT
systems. Some staff reportedly must log into as many as 15 different
systems each shift Also in January it was reported that half of the
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systems each shift. Also in January, it was reported that half of the
23 million records in Australia’s controversial national My Health
Record system contain no information, showing that its perceived
benefits are still convincing to most Australian patients or
practitioners. In March, a research paper [PDF] published in
the Mayo Clinic Proceedings indicated that U.S. physicians rated the
usability of their EHRs an “F”, and that poorly implemented EHRs
were contributing to physician burnout.

In May, the U.K.’s National Audit Office reported that the now £8.1
billion IT modernization program being undertaken at the National
Health Service is still a jumbled mess that hasn’t learned the
lessons from its previous failure. Originally a £4.2 billion
program in 2016 that promised a “paperless” NHS by 2020, the
target date keeps getting pushed back, with a final cost likely to be
much higher than currently projected. Additionally in May,
a study published in JAMA Network Open that indicated hospital
EHRs were failing to catch 33 percent of potentially harmful drug
interactions and other medication errors, while in June,
a study published in JAMA indicated more than 20 percent of
patients were finding errors in their EHR notes.

In September, the U.S. Coast Guard began piloting its new EHR
system that is based on the $4.4 billion Department of Defense
Military Health System EHR effort called GENESIS that is planned
to be fully deployed across DoD by 2024. The Coast
Guard terminated its $67 million mismanaged EHR effort in 2018.
In October, after a six month delay, the Department of Veteran
Affairs finally rolled out its initial go-live EHR system at the Mann-
Grandstaff Medical Center in Spokane, Washington. The $16.4
billion troubled EHR modernization project is scheduled to
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billion troubled EHR modernization project is scheduled to
complete in 2028, although delays and increased costs are likely
over the next 7 plus years.

Finally, in December, a briefing note written in October to


Saskatchewan's Minister of Health was made public by
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation warning that the
province’s healthcare IT system was at growing risk of failure
because of chronic underfunding. "A major equipment failure
which may disrupt service and risk lives appears inevitable with
the current funding model,” the note warned. When asked to
comment about the note, Health Minister Paul Merriman said he
“will be asking Ministry of Health officials to look into this matter
and to find ways to improve the systems supported by eHealth.”
Why the Minister did not ask in October when he received the note
was not explained.

Policing: The Computer Wrongly ID’ed You

Issues with automated facial recognition (AFR) continue to dog law


enforcement. In wake of social unrest in the U.S. and ongoing
worries over AFR bias, Microsoft and Amazon announced in June
that they would suspend selling face recognition software to police
departments. IBM went one step further and announced in June
that it would no longer work on the technology at all. In August, the
use of AFR by British police was ruled unlawful by a Court of
Appeals until the government officially approves its use.

Along with the push against the use of AFR, there has been a
backlash against the use of predictive policing software. For
example, New Orleans, Louisiana and Los
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Angeles, Oakland and Santa Cruz, California have all moved to


prohibit the use of predictive policing systems.

In December, the Massachusetts State Police announced that it


would suspend using its automatic license plate readers until a time
and date glitch found to be affecting five years-worth of data was
corrected.

There were other police IT issues in the U.K. as well. In January, it


was revealed that an error in the City of London Police’s new crime
reporting service that was launched in 2018 kept information on
over 300,000 fraud crime reports from being shared by
the National Fraud Database with the London Police for 15-months.
The database is used by major banks, financial institutions, law
enforcement and government organizations to share information
about fraud and to help the police with their criminal
investigations. Then in October, the U.K.’s Police National
Computer experienced a 10-hour outage blamed on a “human
error,” with one senior police official saying the outage had caused
“absolute chaos” across the country’s police forces.

Troubles with iOPS—the late, costly, and controversial new


computer system installed by the Greater Manchester Police in the
U.K. in late 2019—also persisted unabated throughout the year.
The latest crash occurred just last month. Operational difficulties
with the system have been linked to a staggering inability by the
GMP to record accurate crime data as well.

Rail Transport: Positive Train Control At Last

Few train or subway IT-related problems were reported this past


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year. In July, computer and other issues were reported to continue


to plague Ottawa’s light rail transit system, while in September,
service on the San Francisco area BART system was shut down for
about four hours because of a failure of “one of a dozen field
network devices.”

The biggest news was that after 12-years, 41 U.S. freight and
passenger railroads have met (with two-days to spare) the federal
mandate for deploying positive train control to prevent train
accidents, such as train-to-train collisions, derailments caused by
excessive train speed, train movements through misaligned track
switches, and unauthorized train entry into work zones. Vehicle-
train and track or equipment failures can still cause train accidents,
however. The original deadline was the end of 2015, but that
was date shifted back five years as it became clear most railroads
would not be able to meet the mandate.

It should be noted that the National Transportation Safety


Board first recommended a form of automatic train control back in
1969.

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

Finally, a note on what did not seem to happen. Typically, every


year there are several memorable IT project failures or
cancellations or other major dumpster fires. However, for all its
legendary failures and disappointments, 2020 is marked by a
dearth of this particular breed of IT catastrophe. There was
Australian government’s Visa Processing Platform outsourcing
plan failure that cost AU$92 million, the decision by Nacogdoches
(Texas) Memorial Hospital to terminate its $20 million EHR
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(Texas) Memorial Hospital to terminate its $20 million EHR
contract for Cerner’s Community Works platform, and
the Cyberpunk 2077 launch fiasco, but there have been few others
that made the news. Whether there indeed were fewer IT project
failures (and maybe more successes?), or just fewer reported,
should be clearer a year from now at our next review.

MORE FROM SPECTRUM

E-Waste Is a Cybersecurity Problem, Too - IEEE Spectrum ›

Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures ›

TAGS

SECURITY NETWORKS COMPUTING FAILURES SOLARWINDS ATTACK IT FAILURES IT CYBERSECURITY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged


international authority on information technology and systems risk management. See
full bio →

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PUBLISH

4 JAN 2022
Martin Viller
That's pretty scary to understand that it's 2022 already, but we still face awful
cybersecurity fails https://utopia.fans/tools/the-best-known-cybersecurity-fails/ So
many things were already told about that and people can't learn simple rules to
follow. But on the other hand, hackers also improve every day, so it becomes hard to
secure yourself from all sides.

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AD V ERT I SEME NT

FEATURE TELECOMMUNICATIONS

HOW THE FCC


SETTLES
RADIO-
SPECTRUM
TURF WARS
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TURF WARS
6/27/22, 5:06 PM 2021 Cybersecurity and IT Failures Roundup - IEEE Spectrum

Remember the 5G-airport controversy? Here’s how


such disputes play out

BY MITCHELL LAZARUS

27 MAY 2022 11 MIN READ


  

AD V ERT I SEME NT

The airline and cellular-phone industries have been at loggerheads over the
possibility that 5G transmissions from antennas such as this one, located at Los
Angeles International Airport, could interfere with the radar altimeters used in
aircraft. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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You’ve no doubt seen the scary headlines: Will 5G Cause Planes


to Crash? They appeared late last year, after the U.S. Federal
Aviation Administration warned that new 5G services from
AT&T and Verizon might interfere with the radar altimeters that
airplane pilots rely on to land safely. Not true, said AT&T and
Verizon, with the backing of the U.S. Federal Communications
Commission, which had authorized 5G. The altimeters are safe,
they maintained. Air travelers didn’t know what to believe.

Another recent FCC decision had also created a controversy


about public safety: okaying Wi-Fi devices in a 6-gigahertz
frequency band long used by point-to-point microwave systems
to carry safety-critical data. The microwave operators predicted
that the Wi-Fi devices would disrupt their systems; the Wi-Fi
interests insisted they would not. (As an attorney, I represented
a microwave-industry group in the ensuing legal dispute.)

Keep Reading ↓

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