A new brand of cyber security: hacking the hackers

WASHINGTON — As head of the FBI's cyber crimes division, Shawn Henry often had to deal with exasperated company executives after his agents informed them that their networks had been hacked and their secrets pilfered.

"By whom?" the company officials would ask. "What have they taken? Where did it go?"

"Sorry," Henry's agents had to reply, "that's classified."

Even though the FBI in many cases had evidence the attacker had been backed by a foreign intelligence agency, agents couldn't disclose it because the U.S. government believed doing so could compromise top-secret sources and methods.

Henry, 50, decided this year that such a dichotomy shouldn't put companies at such a disadvantage. So after 24 years of service, he left the FBI to become president of CrowdStrike, an Internet security start-up in Irvine.

His new mission: to make life difficult for hackers trying to attack American institutions.

CrowdStrike is at the forefront of a new business model for cyber security, one that identifies sophisticated foreign attackers trying to steal U.S. intellectual property and uses the attackers' own techniques and vulnerabilities to thwart them.

The firm is marketing itself as a private cyber intelligence agency, staking out networks to catch infiltrators, assembling dossiers on hackers and fooling intruders into stealing bogus data.

In the process, the firm has waded into a debate about how far companies should go in defending themselves from cyber attack.

"The traditional way of trying to defend your network is just not going to cut it. You have to do something different," said Irving Lachow, who directs the Program on Technology and National Security at the Center for a New American Security.

"One way is to engage the adversary. CrowdStrike represents a new breed of company that is focused on doing exactly that," he said.

When somebody is shooting at you, "you don't ask, 'Is that a 9-millimeter or a .45,'" said CrowdStrike Chief Executive George Kurtz. "You ask: 'Who is shooting at me and why are they shooting at me?'"

The attackers often breach company networks using a tactic known as spear phishing, a practice that gets an employee to download a malware file by disguising it, for example, in an email purporting to be from someone the worker knows. Firewalls and anti-virus software are almost useless against such techniques.

So CrowdStrike uses decoys to lure hackers into a controlled environment so investigators can watch and trace the attack. Sometimes the company feeds hackers false information, as in a case recently when a client was entering negotiations in China and expected to be hacked.

CrowdStrike, which employs Chinese linguists and former U.S. government cyber warriors, also has identified Chinese hackers using clues in their malware. It then profiles them — complete with real names and photos — using information gathered from a variety of sources.

That has helped the company, for example, identify a Chinese hacker who targets financial institutions and tends to seek merger and acquisition information. The company assigned the hacker a code name, Capital Panda, in the profile.

Profiles enable a more targeted defense by helping CrowdStrike know when an attacker is likely to strike, how he communicates, what malware he uses and how he tries to take the stolen data.

Kurtz, a former chief technology officer at security firm McAfee Inc., started CrowdStrike in February with fellow McAfee alum Dmitri Alperovitch and $26 million in financing from private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

Alperovitch rose to prominence last year when he wrote a white paper on what he called Operation Shady Rat, a series of state-sponsored cyber penetrations of more than 70 government agencies, companies and institutions. He didn't say publicly the intrusions came from China, but that was obvious to other experts.

China denies engaging in cyber espionage. U.S. intelligence officials said hackers sponsored by China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, are responsible for what Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, has called "the greatest transfer of wealth in history" by siphoning bid documents, formulas, business plans and other intellectual property from Western companies.

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For dropouts, a way to drop back in

The corner of 4th and Gless streets in East Los Angeles, once a center of prostitution and drugs, now houses a place of soaring dreams.

Inside the gleaming Boyle Heights Technology Youth Center, a classroom of young people battered by hard luck or bad choices is filled with quiet, focused energy.

Marcos Avila, a 19-year-old who was kicked out of high school for fighting, is learning to compare and contrast two essays. Vincent Guzman, 18, who left school after his brother was killed in a drive-by shooting, is puzzling over two-step algebraic problems.

Until recently, the two men were part of a growing epidemic of young people who have dropped out of school, can't find steady work and are disconnected from any path to better lives. According to a study released Monday, the number of Californians ages 16 to 24 who neither work nor attend school has grown to 868,000, an increase of 35% since 2000.

The study by two children's advocacy organizations, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Children Now, found that the recession had boosted the rates of these young people — particularly in African American, Latino and low-income communities. Many of them were caught in a squeeze between fewer jobs and a demand for higher skills, the report said.

Among African Americans, 45% of young people don't work or attend school; the figure is 39% for Latinos, 28% for whites and 26% for Asians. Young people whose families earn less than $20,000 a year are three times more likely to be out of work or school than those in higher-income families.

"These numbers are eye-opening and unacceptable," said Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, an Oakland-based nonpartisan policy and advocacy organization. "California's next generation is getting off on the wrong start and it's a real precarious situation for their future and ours."

The report calls for more funding for young people, saying federal money is primarily aimed at adult employment programs. The report also promotes a shift from piecemeal programs to a comprehensive effort to get young people back on track through integrated education, training and support services across city, county and school systems. Strong relationships with caring adults are also key, the report said.

That's exactly the approach the city is taking in its new program in Boyle Heights and elsewhere, said Robert Sainz, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Community Development Department.

The $13-million federally funded program features an unusual partnership between the city and Los Angeles Unified School District. The city has long offered job training programs for dropouts, commissioning a study seven years ago that found nearly 20% of 492,000 Los Angeles residents ages 16 to 24 had left school and weren't working. A follow-up study in 2009 found the problem had not diminished.

"You had basically a small city of people neither at school or work," Sainz said. "When you have a group not progressing socially or academically, you're not going to be developing a work pool of the future."

The new program expects to reach 10,000 young people in a year.

As national attention honed in on the dropout problem, Sainz and his team visited several cities in search of effective programs and decided to shift the majority of their federal workforce development money to this group. But a key issue was trying to find the dropouts, since their names, addresses and phone numbers are confidential school records.

That's when the city and Los Angeles Unified agreed to team up and share the $120,000 annual cost of placing a school counselor in each of the city's 13 youth centers that are hosting the program. With access to school records, the pupil services and attendance counselors can hunt down dropouts and give them an academic assessment on how many credits they need to earn a high school diploma or equivalent credential known as a GED.

That's how Maria Ocampo, 18, ended up at the Boyle Heights tech center. The bright, articulate student hails from a Mexican immigrant family of teachers and nurses, but dropped out of Roosevelt High School in May to take care of her ill mother.

In August, Los Angeles Unified counselor Sara Puma tracked her down — just in time to join the program's first class in September. A strength of the program, students said, is the supportive staff, including a social worker who gives them a mental health assessment and case workers who keep them on track.

Case worker Marie Landeros, for instance, found one young charge who missed class and sternly told him that sleeping in "isn't going to work for me" because the center is paying for his education; he now attends and calls if he's going to be late.

Landeros, who grew up in Boyle Heights, keeps her door open and candy jar filled to develop the trusting relationships that she and others say are important to their success with students.

Ocampo is completing course work for her English composition class and expects to earn her diploma in June after finishing health, algebra and history classes. She said it was easier to focus at the center, where the curriculum is self-paced and there is no peer pressure to ditch class.

But academics are not the program's only benefit. The center also helps students find internships and jobs. Ocampo, for instance, found an internship with the California Democratic Party, where she worked on the successful Proposition 30 school tax initiative. Along the way she met a bevy of elected officials, including former President Clinton, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Los Angeles school board President Monica Garcia.

The experience has given her a new dream: attend Mills College in Oakland and eventually run for elective office.

"This program helps you achieve what you really want," she said.

Avila, who was kicked out of two high schools and left a third, has traded aimless days of video games, basketball and TV for a path to a diploma and what he hopes will be a career as a video game designer. He said his brother told him about the program after hearing about it in a firefighting training class.

He said he was known for his "fists of fury" in high school, but not anymore. "I've cooled down and realize what's more important is school," he said.

Guzman hopes to earn his GED and dreams of feeding his passion for cars as a Mercedes-Benz technician.

Other former dropouts say they want to become electricians, filmmakers, artists.

"A lot of people look at dropout kids as throwaways, but we have the fundamental belief that they can succeed," Sainz said.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

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Study shows growth in second screen users

NEW YORK (AP) — Television viewers were once called couch potatoes. Many are becoming more active while watching now, judging by the findings in a new report that illustrates the explosive growth in people who watch TV while connected to social media on smartphones and tablets.

The Nielsen company said that one in three people using Twitter in June sent messages at some point about the content of television shows, an increase of 27 percent from only five months earlier. And that was before the Olympics, which was probably the first big event to illustrate the extent of second screen usage.

"Twitter has become the second screen experience for television," said Deirdre Bannon, vice president of social media at Nielsen.

Social networking is becoming so pervasive that the study found nearly a third of people aged 18-to-24 reported using the sites while in the bathroom.

An estimated 41 percent of tablet owners and 38 percent of smartphone owners used their device while also watching television at least once a day, Nielsen said.

That percentage hasn't changed much; in fact, 40 percent of smartphone owners reported daily dual screen usage a year earlier, Nielsen said. The difference is that far more people own these devices and they are using them for a longer period of time. The company estimated that Americans spent a total of 157.5 billion minutes on mobile devices in July 2012, nearly doubling the 81.8 billion the same month a year earlier.

"There are big and interesting implications," Bannon said. "I think both television networks and advertisers are onto it."

The social media can provide networks with real-time feedback on what they are doing. The performance of moderators at presidential debates this fall was watched more closely than perhaps ever before, because people were instantly taking on Twitter to provide their own critiques.

It also makes for some conflicting information: Twitter buzzed with complaints last summer about NBC's policy of airing many Olympics events from London on tape delay, yet ratings for the prime-time Olympics telecast soared past expectations.

The increase in people watching television and commenting about it online would seem to run counter to another big trend this fall: more people recording programs and watching them at a later hour. Those contrary trends both increase the value of live event programming like awards shows or sporting events.

The Nielsen study also found that 35 percent of people who used tablets while watching TV looked up information online about the program they were watching. A quarter of tablet owners said they researched coupons or deals for products they saw advertised on television

As rapid as the use of social media while on television is growing in the United States, it already lags behind other countries. Nielsen said that 63 percent of people in the Middle East or Africa report using social media while on TV, and 52 percent of people in Latin America.

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Call That Kept Nursing Home Patients in Sandy’s Path

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Workers were shocked that nursing and adult homes in areas like Rockaway Park, Queens, weren’t evacuated.

Hurricane Sandy was swirling northward, four days before landfall, and at the Sea Crest Health Care Center, a nursing home overlooking the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, workers were gathering medicines and other supplies as they prepared to evacuate.

Then the call came from health officials: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, acting on the advice of his aides and those of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, recommended that nursing homes and adult homes stay put. The 305 residents would ride out the storm.

The same advisory also took administrators by surprise at the Ocean Promenade nursing home, which faces the Atlantic Ocean in Queens. They canceled plans to move 105 residents to safety.

“No one gets why we weren’t evacuated,” said a worker there, Yisroel Tabi. “We wouldn’t have exposed ourselves to dealing with that situation.”

The recommendation that thousands of elderly, disabled and mentally ill residents remain in more than 40 nursing homes and adult homes in flood-prone areas of New York City had calamitous consequences.

At least 29 facilities in Queens and Brooklyn were severely flooded. Generators failed or were absent. Buildings were plunged into a cold, wet darkness, with no access to power, water, heat and food.

While no immediate deaths were reported, it took at least three days for the Fire Department, the National Guard and ambulance crews from around the country to rescue over 4,000 nursing home and 1,500 adult home residents. Without working elevators, many had to be carried down slippery stairwells.

“I was shocked,” said Greg Levow, who works for an ambulance service and helped rescue residents at Queens. “I couldn’t understand why they were there in the first place.”

Many sat for hours in ambulances and buses before being transported to safety through sand drifts and debris-filled floodwaters. They went to crowded shelters and nursing homes as far away as Albany, where for days, they often lacked medical charts and medications. Families struggled to locate relatives.

The decision not to empty the nursing homes and adult homes in the mandatory evacuation area was one of the most questionable by the authorities during Hurricane Sandy. And an investigation by The New York Times found that the impact was worsened by missteps that officials made in not ensuring that these facilities could protect residents.

They did not require that nursing homes maintain backup generators that could withstand flooding. They did not ensure that health care administrators could adequately communicate with government agencies during and after a storm. And they discounted the more severe of the early predictions about Hurricane Sandy’s surge.

The Times’s investigation was based on interviews with officials, health care administrators, doctors, nurses, ambulance medics, residents, family members and disaster experts. It included a review of internal State Health Department status reports. The findings revealed the striking vulnerability of the city’s nursing and adult homes.

On Sunday, Oct. 28, the day before Hurricane Sandy arrived, Mr. Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation in Zone A, the low-lying neighborhoods of the city. But by that point, Mr. Bloomberg, relying on the advice of the city and state health commissioners, had already determined that people in nursing homes and adult homes should not leave, officials said.

The mayor’s recommendations that health care facilities not evacuate startled residents of Surf Manor adult home in Coney Island, said one of them, Norman Bloomfield. He recalled that another resident exclaimed, “What about us! Why’s he telling us to stay?”

The commissioners made the recommendation to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo because they said they believed that the inherent risks of transporting the residents outweighed the potential dangers from the storm.

In interviews, senior Bloomberg and Cuomo aides did not express regret for keeping the residents in place.

“I would defend all the decisions and the actions” by the health authorities involving the storm, said Linda I. Gibbs, a deputy mayor. “I feel like I’m describing something that was a remarkable, lifesaving event.”

Dr. Nirav R. Shah, the state health commissioner, who regulates nursing homes, said: “I’m not even thinking of second-guessing the decisions.”

Still, officials in New Jersey and in Nassau County adopted a different policy, evacuating nursing homes in coastal areas well before the storm.

Contradictory Forecasts

The city’s experience with Tropical Storm Irene last year weighed heavily on state and city health officials and contributed to their underestimating the impact of Hurricane Sandy, according to records and interviews.

Before Tropical Storm Irene, the officials ordered nursing homes and adult homes to evacuate. The storm caused relatively minor damage, but the evacuation led to millions of dollars in health care, transportation, housing and other costs, and took a toll on residents.

As a result, when Hurricane Sandy loomed, the officials were acutely aware that they could come under criticism if they ordered another evacuation that proved unnecessary.

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New-home communities boast food-related amenities

If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, can builders and developers land home buyers via the same route?

That may be something of a stretch, but food-related amenities are fast becoming a way to make today's new-home communities stand out from the competition.

For example, a few years ago, developers would have asked authorities to chase away any food truck that set up shop near their community centers. And if a homeowner turned his backyard into a farm, the community association probably would have objected.

Now mobile dining and urban agriculture are the rage, and forward-thinking developers are welcoming vendors and gardeners as part of their amenity packages. Call these new edible community features "gastronomic extras."

Mobile kitchens are helping to energize many downtown markets at lunchtime, and they can do the same at master-planned communities, according to panelists who shared their best ideas on what it will take to succeed at a recent Urban Land Institute conference.

Mobile vending used to be the sole purview of ice cream trucks and food and vegetable wagons. But now a variety of gourmet and ethnic meals are being served from vans and even pickup trucks.

These meals on wheels are welcome not only at lunchtime but also in the late afternoon — say, just after school — or any other regularly scheduled time, such as during sporting events.

"Creative retail is a wonderful thing," said Theresa Frankiewicz, vice president of community development at Crown Community Development of Naperville, Ill.

Just as hot as mobile dining is urban farming. Agriculture is supplanting golf courses as today's must-have amenity, said Randal Jackson, president of the Planning Center/DC&E, a consulting firm in Santa Ana.

One good thing about gardening is that developers don't have to devote big acreage to it, which is important with today's downsized projects. Whereas golf courses can easily gobble up a couple of hundred acres, community garden plots may require as little as one.

Some builders are offering storage sheds, arbors, greenhouses and even vegetable beds as options. One well-stocked backyard garden can yield enough produce to feed the entire block, according to one Urban Land Institute panelist.

Following the same food-based theme, Adam McAbee of John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine recently noticed a couple of attention-grabbing features that are intended to stick in visitors' minds long after they've left the premises.

One, in a San Diego market with a predominantly Asian buyer profile, was a wok kitchen, offered as an "extended prep" area off the main kitchen. Another was a sales office that looked decidedly like a French countryside cafe, where prospects could linger and sip coffee.

Creating a social infrastructure has long been as important to developers as streets and sewers. But nowadays that means going beyond intranet systems and clubs, especially if the property is large enough to support retail and commercial components.

Anything that gives a project a sense of place and encourages social interaction will create value, the Urban Land Institute panelists stressed. It could be a trout stream, such as the one running through a Salt Lake City project, or a riverside park, such as the one below a freeway in Houston.

One of the best tools for bringing people together is restaurants, according to developers. "You buy a couch once every 10 years, but you eat three times a day," said Jonathan Brinsden of Midway Development, the developer of the CityCentre mixed-use property built on an old mall site in Houston.

Other people magnets are athletic clubs and hotels, if the properties are large enough to support them.

"Athletic facilities are part of our daily lives now," Brinsden said. "And public spaces are so ingrained in our DNA that they are the most valuable acres in our project."

lsichelman@aol.com

Distributed by Universal Uclick for United Feature Syndicate.

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A father's long battle for his daughters

Luis Ernesto Rodriguez eyed the metal door as he waited for his little girls. Now 6 and 5 years old, they were his only children, inseparable, with thick black hair and mischievous smiles that reminded people of little mermaids.

More than two years had passed since he had last seen them. What would they be like now? Would they recognize him? He had shed 20 pounds during the long journey north.

The door opened and his girls bounded into the tiny room. They shouted and laughed the same way they did when he used to carry one in each arm on the way to day care.

PHOTOS: The case of Luis Ernesto Rodriguez

But their smiles melted away when they saw the thick wall of Plexiglas between them and their father, clothed in an orange jumpsuit worn by detainees at an immigration detention center in California's Imperial Valley. There would be no hugs, no kisses.

The girls pressed their palms to the barrier. Rodriguez did the same. His older daughter showed him how to shape a heart with her hands. Rodriguez did the same.

"Be patient," Rodriguez said. "I promise I'll be with you again."

::

Rodriguez last caressed his daughters in the predawn darkness of their cluttered apartment in South Los Angeles. The girls were asleep under the pink sheets of their shared bed when he kissed them and then rushed out to seek day laborer work at the Home Depot store on Slauson Avenue.

FULL COVERAGE: Without a country

It was there, on that morning in November 2008, where police converged on Rodriguez, weapons drawn, and arrested him on suspicion of armed robbery. A short man with a bristly mustache, Rodriguez, then 39, fit the description of a man who had swiped three gold rings from a woman.

It was an apparent case of mistaken identity. No charges were filed, but Rodriguez wasn't going back to his girls.

An immigrant from El Salvador with a troubled past, he had a deportation order dating to 1991. He spent the next two months in jails.

The girls ended up with their maternal grandmother, who was destitute and suffered from memory lapses, so social workers took them away. They joined the thousands of children nationwide who are under custody of child protection agencies after their parents have been placed in deportation proceedings or deported. An estimated 5,000 such children are in foster care, about 1,000 of them in Los Angeles County, according to juvenile court attorneys and the Applied Research Center, a nonprofit racial justice think tank.

Many follow their deported mothers and fathers, if the parents can convince U.S. agencies that they can provide a stable life in their home countries. In such cases, social workers from Los Angeles escort the children to parents at joyous airport reunions, usually in Mexico and El Salvador.

But sometimes parents fail. Their children either languish in foster care or they're adopted by American couples. Some never see their biological parents again.

::

In January 2009, Rodriguez was placed on a flight to El Salvador, a nation he had fled as a teen, when it was rife with war.

He had hours to agonize over his girls' fate. "Being away from them was tearing me apart," he recalled.

Rodriguez had been through such a separation before. In 2007, social workers had taken his daughters from Rodriguez's dirty, near-empty apartment in South Los Angeles. Rodriguez and his wife, Blanca, were cocaine users.

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iPad mini shortages may soon be resolved

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Katzenberg, Spielberg attend Governors Awards

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tom Hanks. Quincy Jones. Kristen Stewart. Warren Beatty. Quentin Tarantino. George Lucas. Steven Spielberg. Kirk Douglas. Amy Adams. Richard Gere.

These and other famous folks came to the film academy's Governors Awards Saturday to honor filmmakers whose names may not be as well known, but whose contributions to the industry have affected movie-lovers everywhere.

Documentarian D.A. Pennebaker helped make the medium mainstream with his direct-cinema approach. George Stevens, Jr., founded the American Film Institute and established the Kennedy Center Honors. Hal Needham developed new ways of performing and directing death-defying movie stunts. DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charity.

Octogenarians Pennebaker, Stevens and Needham received honorary Oscars for their distinguished careers and Katzenberg was recognized with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Governors Awards ceremony, held at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood and Highland Center.

The film academy has long awarded honorary Oscars, but established a new tradition four years ago of presenting those statuettes at a private dinner party where there are no time limits on speeches. Portions of the untelevised event may be included in the Feb. 24 Academy Awards telecast.

Stars mingled in the ballroom and dined on filet mignon and banana cream pie before academy president Hawk Koch urged them to "finish the deals, make the deals" so the program could begin.

Each honoree was introduced by a pair of stars and a short film of their work.

Michael Moore and Sen. Al Franken introduced Pennebaker. Moore called him an inspiration and the inventor of the modern documentary. Pennebaker ditched the tripod and carried his camera on his shoulder, and "all filmmaking changed," Moore said, "nonfiction and fiction."

The 87-year-old Pennebaker seemed to thank every colleague from his six-decade career during a nearly 20-minute speech that prompted his family to signal him to finish and inspired a joke from Will Smith later in the evening.

"Before I get started, D.A. Pennebaker has a couple more people he wanted to thank," Smith cracked.

Sidney Poitier and Annette Bening introduced Stevens, speaking of his commitment to honoring, preserving and furthering the art of film. In accepting his Oscar, Stevens thanked his late father for encouraging him to consider film a timeless art and "for opening the door for me to a creative life."

Needham "pushed the boundaries of what could be done in action," Tarantino said as he introduced the stuntman and director, adding, "I've ripped off many shots from you."

Al Ruddy, Oscar-winning producer of "The Godfather," described Needham as "one of the good guys" and "a gift to any producer." Ruddy told a story about making 1982's "Megaforce," which Needham directed. The stuntman helped design a rocket for the film's action sequences, and when brought it to the Goldwyn lot to demonstrate it, he accidentally launched it into a new soundstage and burnt the whole thing down. Later, while filming another stunt, Needham crashed a motorcycle and got a concussion, but he was back on set shooting the next morning.

The 81-year-old Needham called himself "the luckiest man alive": He grew up a sharecropper's son with eight years' education and went on to work with Billy Wilder, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. Now he's getting an Academy Award.

"My mom's looking down on tonight with a big smile on her face," he said, choking up and dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief.

He closed by thanking "the entire Hollywood community for allowing me to be a part of it."

Tom Hanks and Will Smith introduced Katzenberg by joking about his persistent calls for charitable donations. The DreamWorks executive has raised more than $230 million as chairman of the Motion Picture and Television Fund foundation.

"Jeffrey has no problem asking for way too much money," Smith said.

"Mostly, all I did was pick up the phone and ask you," Katzenberg said as he accepted his award. "It's you who did it. You who gave of your time, your talent, your money, your hearts. Because that's what you do. That is what Hollywood does."

___

AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/APSandy .

___

Online:

www.oscars.org

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Opinion: A Health Insurance Detective Story

I’VE had a long career as a business journalist, beginning at Forbes and including eight years as the editor of Money, a personal finance magazine. But I’ve never faced a more confounding reporting challenge than the one I’m engaged in now: What will I pay next year for the pill that controls my blood cancer?

After making more than 70 phone calls to 16 organizations over the past few weeks, I’m still not totally sure what I will owe for my Revlimid, a derivative of thalidomide that is keeping my multiple myeloma in check. The drug is extremely expensive — about $11,000 retail for a four-week supply, $132,000 a year, $524 a pill. Time Warner, my former employer, has covered me for years under its Supplementary Medicare Program, a plan for retirees that included a special Writers Guild benefit capping my out-of-pocket prescription costs at $1,000 a year. That out-of-pocket limit is scheduled to expire on Jan. 1. So what will my Revlimid cost me next year?

The answers I got ranged from $20 a month to $17,000 a year. One of the first people I phoned said that no matter what I heard, I wouldn’t know the cost until I filed a claim in January. Seventy phone calls later, that may still be the most reliable thing anyone has told me.

Like around 47 million other Medicare beneficiaries, I have until this Friday, Dec. 7, when open enrollment ends, to choose my 2013 Medicare coverage, either through traditional Medicare or a private insurer, as well as my drug coverage — or I will risk all sorts of complications and potential late penalties.

But if a seasoned personal-finance journalist can’t get a straight answer to a simple question, what chance do most people have of picking the right health insurance option?

A study published in the journal Health Affairs in October estimated that a mere 5.2 percent of Medicare Part D beneficiaries chose the cheapest coverage that met their needs. All in all, consumers appear to be wasting roughly $11 billion a year on their Part D coverage, partly, I think, because they don’t get reliable answers to straightforward questions.

Here’s a snapshot of my surreal experience:

NOV. 7 A packet from Time Warner informs me that the company’s new 2013 Retiree Health Care Plan has “no out-of-pocket limit on your expenses.” But Erin, the person who answers at the company’s Benefits Service Center, tells me that the new plan will have “no practical effect” on me. What about the $1,000-a-year cap on drug costs? Is that really being eliminated? “Yes,” she says, “there’s no limit on out-of-pocket expenses in 2013.” I tell her I think that could have a major effect on me.

Next I talk to David at CVS/Caremark, Time Warner’s new drug insurance provider. He thinks my out-of-pocket cost for Revlimid next year will be $6,900. He says, “I know I’m scaring you.”

I call back Erin at Time Warner. She mentions something about $10,000 and says she’ll get an estimate for me in two business days.

NOV. 8 I phone Medicare. Jay says that if I switch to Medicare’s Part D prescription coverage, with a new provider, Revlimid’s cost will drive me into Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage.” I’d pay $2,819 the first month, and 5 percent of the cost of the drug thereafter — $563 a month or maybe $561. Anyway, roughly $9,000 for the year. Jay says AARP’s Part D plan may be a good option.

NOV. 9 Erin at Time Warner tells me that the company’s policy bundles United Healthcare medical coverage with CVS/Caremark’s drug coverage. I can’t accept the medical plan and cherry-pick prescription coverage elsewhere. It’s take it or leave it. Then she puts CVS’s Michele on the line to get me a Revlimid quote. Michele says Time Warner hasn’t transferred my insurance information. She can’t give me a quote without it. Erin says she will not call me with an update. I’ll have to call her.

My oncologist’s assistant steers me to Celgene, Revlimid’s manufacturer. Jennifer in “patient support” says premium assistance grants can cut the cost of Revlimid to $20 or $30 a month. She says, “You’re going to be O.K.” If my income is low enough to qualify for assistance.

NOV. 12 I try CVS again. Christine says my insurance records still have not been transferred, but she thinks my Revlimid might cost $17,000 a year.

Adriana at Medicare warns me that AARP and other Part D providers will require “prior authorization” to cover my Revlimid, so it’s probably best to stick with Time Warner no matter what the cost.

But Brooke at AARP insists that I don’t need prior authorization for my Revlimid, and so does her supervisor Brian — until he spots a footnote. Then he assures me that it will be easy to get prior authorization. All I need is a doctor’s note. My out-of-pocket cost for 2013: roughly $7,000.

NOV. 13 Linda at CVS says her company still doesn’t have my file, but from what she can see about Time Warner’s insurance plans my cost will be $60 a month — $720 for the year.

CVS assigns my case to Rebecca. She says she’s “sure all will be fine.” Well, “pretty sure.” She’s excited. She’s been with the company only a few months. This will be her first quote.

NOV. 14 Giddens at Time Warner puts in an “emergency update request” to get my files transferred to CVS.

Frank Lalli is an editorial consultant on retirement issues and a former senior executive editor at Time Warner’s Time Inc.

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When home security salesman comes knocking, beware

Door-to-door sellers of home alarm systems are required by the state to have passed a criminal background check and have been licensed by the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. (Robert F. Bukaty, Associated Press / December 2, 2012)

By Scott J. Wilson, Los Angeles Times

December 2, 2012

If someone comes to your door selling home security systems, be wary: They could be breaking the law and they could be trying to scam you, according to the state Department of Consumer Affairs. Key things to know:

• Anyone selling home alarm systems door-to-door in California is required to have passed a criminal background check and have been licensed by the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. But in reality, warned the consumer agency, many sellers have done neither. Before listening to the pitch, ask to see the salesperson's state registration card.

• Beware of pressure to sign a contract immediately. Homeowners are sometimes pushed to sign overpriced alarm contracts that last for as long as five years, automatically roll over to a new term and give limited opportunity to cancel, the department said. Some contracts stipulate an early termination fee of several thousand dollars.

• In one scam, a salesperson finds a home with an alarm company sign or sticker and claims to be there to replace or upgrade the system. Or the salesperson may tell you that your company has gone out of business and he or she represents the new company. In both cases, state officials said, you will be told you must sign a new contract.

• Note that legitimate alarm companies also sometimes go door to door. "The challenge for the homeowner who answers the front door is to be certain the salesperson represents a reputable company and is not a scam artist," the department said. Call (800) 952-5210 to check whether a business or person is licensed and see whether any complaints have been filed.

• State law gives you a three-day window after signing to cancel a home security contract and get your money back. Deliver your cancellation letter in person or send it by certified mail. To lodge a complaint against an alarm company, visit http://www.bsis.ca.gov and click on "File a Complaint."

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