Daily Report Friday, December 29, 2006
Daily Highlights
The U.S. Border Patrol said on Thursday, December 28, that arrests of illegal immigrants along the U.S..Mexican border have dropped by more than a third since National Guard troops started helping with border security. (See item 11)
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The Department of Homeland Security has designated the state funeral for former President Gerald R. Ford as a National Special Security Event; the U.S Secret Service will assume its legally mandated role as the lead federal agency for the design and implementation of the operational security plan. (See item 23)
Information Technology and Telecommunications Sector
26. December 28, IDG News Service — Internet access back in Asia after earthquake. Asia's Internet and telecommunication infrastructure showed signs of recovery Thursday, December 28, following service disruptions caused by a series of powerful earthquakes off Taiwan's southern coast earlier this week. A pair of powerful earthquakes rattled southern Taiwan within eight minutes of each other on Tuesday evening, local time, causing damage to undersea telecommunication cables. Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said the first was a magnitude 6.7 quake and the second quake was slightly smaller, at magnitude 6.4. Repairing the cables will cost about $1.5 million, Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom Co. Ltd. said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/28/HNaccessbackinasia _1.html
27. December 27, eWeek — Report: Spamming soared in 2006. A report on spam by e.mail security firm Commtouch Software dubs 2006 the "Year of the Zombies." The study found that "zombies" can number up to eight million hosts globally on a given day. As a result, spam volume increased greatly in 2006, according to the report. "Spam outbreaks got bigger, faster and smarter during 2006," Amir Lev, president and chief technical officer for Commtouch, based in Netanya, Israel, said in a statement. "Innovative spammers quickly developed new techniques to bypass common anti.spam technologies and amassed huge zombie botnets. Outbreaks have become so fast, massive and sophisticated that most anti.spam solutions had great difficulty defending against them." Zombie activity, the report found, accounts for 85 percent of the spam circulating the Internet. Multi.wave image.spam outbreaks brought the spam bloat to 1.7 billion MB per day. eBay and PayPal remain top targets for fraud, their names being used in 50 percent of all phishing attempts, the report said.
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