CNN Student News - September 15, 2017

cnn 10

Equifax`s Recent Data Breach; Response of North Korea to New U.N. Sanctions; NASA is Destroying the Cassini Spacecraft

Aired September 15, 2017 - 04:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


CARL AZUZ, cnn 10 ANCHOR: I`m Carl Azuz for cnn 10. And Fridays are awesome! Hope yours is going well so far.

Financially speaking, your credit is your trustworthiness to pay back a loan, might be for a house or a car, or something you buy in a credit card.

One major company that keeps track of people`s credit is Equifax. You don`t sign up for Equifax and you can`t get rid of it. The agency just collects credit information on hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Here`s the bad news, Equifax has been hacked and that might have exposed a massive amount of personal information to people who should not have it.

This is so concerning that the U.S. government which doesn`t usually comment on ongoing investigations has confirmed that it`s gotten involved to try to find out what went wrong.

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JOSE PAGLIERY, cnn INVESTIGATIVE CURNOW: Equifax, one of the three big credit monitoring companies, those companies that track all of your finances and everything you do, just announced that hackers have broken into the company`s databases and stolen information on 143 million Americans. For perspective, that`s more than half of American adults, and the thing is, you might be affected even if you don`t use Equifax, because Equifax tracks everybody.

So, what happened exactly? Hackers, we`re not sure who, stole names, birthdays, addresses, Social Security numbers and importantly, driver`s license numbers. This is extremely sensitive information that can be used to steal your identity.

According to the company, they also got access to 209,000 people`s credit card numbers. This is the kind of thing that hackers can try to sell on the black market and fraudsters can then steal your tax refund at the end of the year, open up a bank account in your name, or in a pretty worse case scenario, print out fake IDs, get in trouble and police will be looking for you, not the fraudster.

You might be affected by this, even if you`ve never heard of Equifax, because this company tracks everyone who`s applied for a loan, a mortgage, or open up a bank account.

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AZUZ: Lawsuits are expected over this. Equifax has been accused of not doing enough to protect people`s information from potential hacks. The agency is offering free temporary credit monitoring to those who might have been affected. Experts say people should sign up for that to check their own credit reports and they consider freezing their credit, which can make it harder for someone else to use your name to open an account.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency says many people in North Korea are malnourished and live under bad conditions, and the international penalties on the country for its recent nuclear test are designed to squeeze its economy more than ever. But in the capital, where cnn`s Will Ripley was recently allowed to travel, he didn`t hear people say they were worried.

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WILL RIPLEY, cnn INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Here in Pyongyang, government officials are strongly condemning this latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions, using words like evil, vicious, calling it a full scale economic blockade.

But when you go out on the streets and speak with regular people, they don`t seem concerned at all.

(voice-over): It`s tough to find a traffic light in Pyongyang. Traffic cops direct the flow of cars, the streets noticeably busier each time I come here, busier at least for now.

The U.S. says the latest U.N. sanctions threaten to cut North Korea`s oil supply by nearly a third, which could spike prices for everything from taxis to energy. A ban on textile imports and the end of foreign labor contracts could further slash the income of this cash starve country.

But if you Ri Hye Hyang, she`s not worried. Her refreshment stand has a steady flow of customers. She says life is improving despite round after round of increasingly heavy sanctions.

We have no problems, she says. Everything I`m selling is made local. We don`t worry. We rely on ourselves.

Kim Hye Song casually shrugs off threats from the United States.

(on camera): The U.S. President Donald Trump said that these sanctions are just not a big deal and that there`s much worse to come. Does that worry you at all?

(voice-over): We don`t care what the U.S. president says or what the outside world thinks about us, she says. We don`t worry because we believe in the leadership of Marshall Kim Jong-un.

Keep in mind this is a very thin slice of life in this closed country.

(on camera): It`s good.

(voice-over): Reporters like us can only see what the government allows. But all over the North Korean capital, we see plenty of new construction, an increasingly modern skyline, a mandate from North Korea`s leader Kim Jong-un, determined to prove he can grow the economy and the nuclear

program, all in the face of uNPRecedented sanctions for his repeated violations of international law.

(on camera): You see these posters all over Pyongyang and they pretty much sum up North Korea`s official response to increase pressure from the U.S.

(voice-over): More missiles.

North Korean propaganda is built around their nuclear program. It symbolizes strength, independence, it`s key to their national identity.

(on camera): Is there anything, anything at all that could get North Korea to walk away from its nuclear program?

We`ll never give them up, says Ri Chang Son. If we did, it would mean our destruction.

Around town, new poster shows a pair of hands ripping up U.N. sanctions resolutions. North Korea`s defiant message: they will never give up their nukes, even if that means life is about to get a lot harder.

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AZUZ (voice-over): Ten-second trivia:

Which of these astronomers is credited with discovering a gap between Saturn`s rings?

Galileo, Copernicus, Cassini, or Kepler?

Giovanni Domenico Cassini is the namesake of Saturn`s Cassini division, a gap in its rings.

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AZUZ: Not coincidentally, he`s also the namesake of NASA`s Cassini spacecraft, which launched toward the ringed planet in October of 1997. At a cost of over $3 billion, most of which was paid for by the U.S., Cassini sent back hundreds of thousands of pictures, and carried a probe that landed on one of Saturn`s moons.

But NASA has set Friday as Cassini`s last, because it wants to control where the spacecraft goes when it runs out of fuel.

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ANNOUNCER: And liftoff of the Cassini spacecraft on a billion mile trek to Saturn.

ROBYN CURNOW, cnn CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Cassini left Earth almost two decades ago, and since then has beamed back a treasure trove of images and information from Jupiter, Saturn and many of the ringed planet`s mysterious moons.

Cassini was also the mother ship for a probe that would land on Saturn`s largest moon Titan, a world of clouds made of methane and hydrocarbon lakes. It was the most remote spacecraft landing yet.

While Titan`s close up was groundbreaking, another of Saturn`s moons, Enceladus, sparked even more attention.

MICHELE DOUGHERTY, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, CASSINI MAGNETOMETER: It`s a moon that my team discovered a water vapor plumes (ph). But not only is there liquid water underneath the surface, but there`s organic material, there`s a heat source.

CURNOW: Those three things, if stable, over time, are all the ingredients needed to create life and scientists akin to protect it from any microbes, stood away on Cassini.

NICO ALTOBELLI, PROJECT MANAGER, ESA CASSINI: The spacecraft is running out of fuel and it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate it for the system and what you want to avoid is to crash on one, on the icy moon, like Enceladus, where habitability and (INAUDIBLE) astrobiological potential has been recovered.

CURNOW: To avoid that scenario, Cassini is being sent on a suicide mission. On September 15th, it will die through Saturn`s atmosphere, burning up in a process, but in those final minutes, its antennas will be pointed towards home, sending back pressure information, right up until its fiery end.

Robyn Curnow, cnn.

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AZUZ: Hard to imagine a conductor who`s more robotic than this. Of course, that`s kind of a point. It`s called YuMi. It doesn`t seem to have the finesse of Bugs Bunny, but it was recently taught to conduct a performance at Italy`s Verdi Theater. YuMi could not improvise on its own, and it would have been thrown off altogether if the musicians had played something different. But it seemed to give a successful performance even alongside superstar tenor Andrea Bocelli.

Even if they didn`t hit the concert circuit, they still hit the concert circuit, and though YuMi didn`t baton an eye of the challenge, it`s one thing to have good conduct and conductors, it`s another thing to be one. And the human conductor ain`t passing the baton just yet.

I`m Carl Azuz for cnn 10. We hope you orchestrate one exceptional weekend.

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