Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Daily Report

According to the Associated Press, the secretary of energy said Monday that government mandates are not ideal but might be a necessary part of efforts to boost the use of alternative fuels. Among the challenges in promoting alternative energy are making fossil fuels friendlier to the environment, and making renewable fuel production more affordable and easier to bring to market, said the official. (See items 3)

• The Financial Times reports that, according to security forces in Azerbaijan, the U.S.

embassy there had been the target of a planned attack by a group of radical Islamist fighters captured outside Baku over the weekend. In Washington, the state department spokesman said the U.S. embassy took “precautionary steps” in response to some “threat information,” but declined to describe either the threats or the steps taken. (See item 24)

Information Technology

28. October 30, ZDNet (National) MessageLabs: Watch out for audio and video spam. Email security company MessageLabs has warned that spammers are already modifying their tactics when it comes to the emerging trend of using audio rather than text attachments in unsolicited mail. In a statement, MessageLabs claimed that spammers are now moving on from simply attaching audio to mail to linking through to content hosted on multimedia sites such as YouTube. (Earlier this month, computer security firm Sophos reported that spammers were exploiting YouTube’s “invite your friends” function to send email spam containing a variant of the Storm worm). “This recent trend proves that spamming techniques are becoming more innovative,” said MessageLabs in its statement. On 17 October spammers used attached MP3 music files to try to “sneak messages past spam filters,” said MessageLabs. The spam run of 15 million emails lasted 36 hours and used Storm worm-infected computers for the purposes of dissemination. “The MP3 spam tactic is a natural progression for cybercriminals following runs of image, PDF and Excel junk mail earlier this year,” said a chief security analyst for MessageLabs. “As users become wary of certain file attachments, scammers will move on to their next tactic.” According to MessageLabs, spammers have recently been experimenting with different types of file attachments, including text, image, HTML, ZIP, RAR, RTF and PDF file formats.

Source: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39290439,00.htm

29. October 29, Reuters (National) Bogus FTC e-mail has virus. The Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) warned consumers on Monday not to open a bogus e-mail that appears to come from its fraud department because it carries an attachment that can download a virus that has the ability to steal passwords and account numbers. The e-mail says it is from “frauddep@ftc.gov” and has the FTC’s government seal. “We’ve received hundreds if not thousands of calls and complaints, this one may have had a large distribution,” said a source in the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. The agency, which is one of several government agencies investigating cyber fraud, does not know how many people have received the e-mail.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071029/tc_nm/ftc_fraud_virus_dc;_ylt=AmyJdwbnj8gl3a
Ti3U5LmacWIr0F

Communications Sector

30. October 29, Star Tribune (Minnesota) Cut phone line strands Twin Cities businesses. Thousands of small-business telephone customers in the Twin Cities were cut off from long-distance calls Monday morning when a Verizon Communications fiber-optic cable was severed somewhere between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Des Moines, Iowa. The reasons for the cable break were unclear, said a Verizon Business spokeswoman in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Repairs were complicated because the fiber-optic cable break was located next to a gas pipeline, but work was expected to be completed by late Monday or early Tuesday, she said. By Monday afternoon, Verizon employees were manually rerouting some phone calls to other lines, a move that was necessary because the rural cable that was severed did not have built-in redundancy, as many metro-area fiber lines do.
Source:
http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1516320.html

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Daily Report


  • · The International Herald Tribune reports that, according to a Government Accountability Office report, more than a year after the U.S. Congress told the Energy Department to harden U.S. nuclear bomb factories and laboratories against terrorist raids, 5 of the 11 sites are certain to miss their deadlines. (See items 6)
  • · Computerworld reports that hackers amped up attacks using malicious PDF files that exploit a broad flaw in Windows. The attacks, which began Tuesday, exploit bugs in the Windows versions of Adobe Systems Inc.’s Reader and Acrobat software; Adobe patched the newest editions of those programs Monday, but has not yet updated older variants. (See item 31)

Information Technology

29. October 26, Computerworld – (National) Real reveals six new bugs in RealPlayer. For the second time in eight days, new critical vulnerabilities that could be used to hijack machines have been fingered in the RealPlayer media player. The patched editions
released October 19, for Windows, however, are not vulnerable to the half-dozen bugs, RealNetworks Inc. said. After revealing that RealPlayer included a serious flaw that had
been exploited by hackers who compromised an ad server owned by 24/7 Real Media to spread malware to visitors of legitimate, trusted Web sites, Seattle-based RealNetworks Thursday posted information about the latest vulnerabilities. All six bugs involve RealPlayer’s problems parsing file formats and could be exploited by hackers who first crafted malicious files, then duped users into either opening those rigged files when they received them as e-mail attachments or visiting an attack site that hosted such files. Among the file types: .mov, .mp3, .rm, SMIL, .swf, .ram and .pl.
Source:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=security&articleId=9044309&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

30. October 26, Computerworld – (National) ‘We’re not scared’ of Storm, say researchers. Reports that security researchers are running scared from hackers responsible for the Storm Trojan are overblown, say some of the people who have dug into the complex malware. Earlier this week, a member of IBM’s Internet Security Systems Inc. said that Storm, a multifaceted Trojan Horse that has been used to gather a substantial army of bots (or compromised computers), strikes back using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks when it senses probes of its command-and-control network. These attacks, he said, have researchers spooked. But several researchers took issue with the characterization at Interop New York last Tuesday. They also confirmed, however, that they knew Storm had launched DDoS attacks, and as the IBM representative pointed out, the Trojan has an automated early warning system that sniffs probes made of the botnet. “Storm understands any attempt to understand it, then notifies the bot controller,” said one researcher. “It seems to recognize a threat after several different attempts to probe the bot.” The tactic is not new, but Storm has taken it to higher levels of automation, he said.
Source:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=security&articleId=9044304&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

31. October 26, Computerworld – (National) Russian PDF attacks surge; Microsoft takes blame. On October 25, Microsoft Corp. updated a security advisory that addressed a broad flaw in Windows and said it is working around the clock to fix the bug. But it may be too late for many. Security researchers said hackers had amped up attacks using malicious PDF files that exploit the vulnerability. Helsinki, Finland-based F-Secure Corp. called the surge in spam carrying the rigged PDF documents “massive” and said the run is ongoing. The director of response at iSight Partners Inc., confirmed that the number of messages hitting mailboxes with rogue PDFs soared today. “PDF exploits are ramping up just in time for the weekend,” he said in an e-mail. The attacks, which began Tuesday, exploit bugs in the Windows versions of Adobe Systems Inc.’s Reader and Acrobat software; Adobe patched the newest editions of those programs Monday, but has not yet updated older variants. (See next article.) According to some researchers, the infamous Russian Business Network (RBN), a collective of cybercriminals, is behind the PDF assault.
Source:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=security&articleId=9044310&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

Communications Sector

32. October 29, The New York Times News Service – (National) Apartment dwellers may get cable relief. The Federal Communications Commission, hoping to reduce the spiraling cost of cable television, is preparing to strike down thousands of contracts this week that shut out competitors by giving individual cable companies exclusive rights to provide service to an apartment building, the agency’s chairman says. The new rule could open markets across the country to competition. It would be a huge victory for Verizon Communications and AT&T, which have challenged the cable industry by offering video services. The two phone companies have lobbied aggressively for the provision. They have been supported in their fight by consumer groups, satellite television companies and small rivals to the big cable providers. Commission officials and consumer groups said the rule could significantly lower cable prices for millions of subscribers who live in apartment buildings and have had no choice in selecting a company for paid television. Government and private studies show that when a second cable company enters a market, prices can drop as much as 30 percent.
Source:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chicable_monoct29,0,7719736,print.story

Monday, October 29, 2007

Daily Report


  • · KIRO TV Channel 7 in Seattle, Washington reports that handguns stored in luggage have been disappearing from major airports, which means that dangerous weapons might be loose in secure areas in direct proximity to passenger jets. A number of declared guns have gone missing before the bags arrive at their destinations. Security officials worry that those weapons might end up in the hands of terrorists. (See items 13)
  • · Government Executive reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has yet to develop a comprehensive plan for how companies would recover from cyberattacks that disrupt the Internet, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) auditor. Although the DHS developed a plan in 2006 for how businesses and the government could recover from such cyberattacks, there is no public-private plan for recovery. (See item 29 )

Information Technology

26. October 26, Computerworld – (National) Microsoft now takes blame for WSUS update error. After initially denying reports that it had updated enterprise customer’s PCs with the Windows XP desktop search tool without administrator approval, Microsoft Corp. admitted its mistake. Late Thursday night, a program manager on the WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) team, said the update for Windows Desktop Search (WDS) had, in fact, been installed on some machines without administrator approval, and offered an apology. On a company blog, she said that Microsoft revised and released a WDS update package Tuesday aimed at machines running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 that did not have the desktop search tool installed. The update was supposed to be optional. “Unfortunately, in revising this update, the decision to reuse the same update package had unintended consequences to our WSUS customers,” she said. This meant some computers automatically received the update. Early on Thursday, reports from enterprise users running WSUS -- the Microsoft software that manages updates and patches to Windows client machines -- began hitting support forums claiming that WDS was installing without permission. According to some administrators, the first hint they had of the unexpected installs came from users complaining of slow machines. Others reported the same symptoms, generated by the disk- and processor-intensive initial indexing of the files on the PC.
Source:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=security&articleId=9044239&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

27. October 26, IDG News Service – (National) Scammers sentenced for Microsoft
software scheme. Four people have been sentenced to prison and fined tens of millions of dollars for buying discounted Microsoft Corp. software and then illegally reselling it at a profit. Two of the convicted, husband-and-wife owners of Samtech Research, were sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison and ordered to pay more than $25 million in fines to Microsoft for their role in a software reselling scheme they ran between 1997 and 2001. Together with two associates they purchased more than $29 million worth of software at Microsoft’s academic-discount rates and then resold it to nonacademic entities, making more than $5 million in profits. The couple had already been kicked out of Microsoft’s Authorized Education Reseller (AER) program, but they “formed new corporations ... to disguise their identity from Microsoft and re-enter the AER program,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement yesterday. They laundered their profits by purchasing real estate in their son’s name and by wiring more than $300,000 to Pakistan, the DOJ said. The couple’s associates were also sentenced in connection with the case. The scam was exposed during a two-year undercover investigation called Operation Cyberstorm, which was conducted by the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service.
Source

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=security&articleId=9044219&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

Communications Sector

28. October 26, p2pnet news – (International) Facebook wants Canadian ‘hacker’ names. Facebook is after Canadian ‘John Doe’ hackers it says “may have stolen personal information” from members. And it wants ISPs Rogers Communications Inc. and Look Communications to hand over details. “Court documents allege the hackers may have swiped personal information about Facebook members, including user names, passwords and e-mail addresses,” says the Financial Post, going on: “It is not clear how many Facebook customers were affected or where the hackers live.” Rogers and Look both turned down Facebook’s demand saying they’d only make the data available if a court ordered them to do so. Facebook is poised to oblige. “All other methods of obtaining the evidence and documents have been exhausted,” Facebook said in its application, quoted in the story. “The evidence and documentation of [Rogers and Look] is required so that justice may be done between the parties in the [U.S.] action.” The alleged incidents occurred between June 1 and June 15, “with the hackers improperly gaining access to Facebook’s private data system more than 200,000 times during that period, the lawsuit says,” states the Financial Post.
Source:
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13797

29. October 25, Government Executive – (National) Workforce issues complicate planning for cyberattacks. The Homeland Security Department has yet to develop a
comprehensive plan for how companies would recover from cyberattacks disrupting the
Internet, in part because the department has not been able to find and keep highly trained cybersecurity experts, according to a top information technology auditor at the
Government Accountability Office (GAO). In 2006, DHS developed a plan for how
businesses and the government could recover from a cyberattack that disrupted the
Internet. In that plan, DHS laid out the response that would be coordinated by the National Communications System, which would be responsible for the hardware and security infrastructure. The National Cyber Security Division would be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the software applications and information under attack. Still, “there is no public-private plan for recovery and there is no date by which such a plan must exist,” testified GAO’s director of information technology at a Tuesday hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives. Companies and individuals worldwide lose about $14 billion through the Internet because of malicious code attacks, but the Internet has yet to suffer a catastrophic failure, he said.
Source:
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=38377&dcn=todaysnews

Friday, October 26, 2007

Daily Report

  • According to Associated Press and Seattle Times reports, a congressional investigation revealed a shortage of laboratories needed to test the thousands of people who might be exposed to radiation if a “dirty bomb” detonated in a major city. The report, prepared for the House Committee on Science and Technology, also found that the available tests address only 6 of the 13 radiological isotopes that would likely be used in a dirty bomb. (See items 4 & 27)

  • Fox News reported Thursday that California officials raised a bounty for suspects behind the biggest in a string of deadly wildfires that are responsible for at least 10 deaths, more than 1,500 destroyed homes and nearly half a million scorched acres. Local and state officials have combined with the FBI to hunt down suspects responsible for the blazes. Two suspects were arrested and another died in a gunfight with police. (See item 31)

Information Technology

28. October 25, Computerworld – (Louisiana) Encrypt data stored off site, warns Louisiana agency. The loss of unencrypted storage media from an Iron Mountain Inc. vehicle last month renewed calls for IT managers to better protect data stored off site. The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance (LOFSA) said the unencrypted data lost from the vehicle of its contractor on Sept. 19 included the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of thousands of state residents. The state agency administers several state scholarship programs as well as the state’s 529 College Savings Plan. “LOFSA was in the process of developing our disaster and recovery plan, but [the loss] occurred before we could get it in place and establish it as a standard plan,” said the agency’s assistant executive director and chief operating officer this week. In a statement, Boston-based Iron Mountain blamed the theft on “a driver [who] did not follow established company procedures when loading the container onto his vehicle.” The statement also noted that the company “encourages” its customers to encrypt backup data. Iron Mountain’s CEO said the firm is working hard to eliminate human error by its employees.
Source:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyN ame=security&articleId=9044122&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

29.October 24, Computerworld – (National) IBM fixes four flaws in Notes e-mail, Domino server. IBM patched four vulnerabilities in its Notes and Domino e-mail software to plug holes that could be used to access information or infect systems with malicious code. Collectively ranked as “moderately critical” by Copenhagen-based bug tracker Secunia ApS, the four vulnerabilities involve Notes’ Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) service; its scripting language, LotusScript; the Domino server’s command console; and how both Notes and Domino map memory in Windows when they're used in a shared environment such as Citrix. “Lotus Domino is prone to a vulnerability that may allow attackers to access other users’ sessions,” said Symantec Corp. in an advisory posted today. “If the Lotus Notes client is used in a Microsoft Terminal Services or Citrix environment, users can read each other’s Lotus Notes session data, including items such as e-mail,” the Symantec advisory said. “This vulnerability could also be used to write to the memory mapped files, [allowing] an attacker to potentially inject active content such as Lotus Script.” IBM issued security bulletins today for each vulnerability, and provided links to updates to Versions 7.0.3 and 8.0 that patch the problems. The updates can also be downloaded from the Lotus Upgrade Central Web site.
Source:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyN ame=security&articleId=9043983&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

Communications Sector

30. October 24, Reuters – (National) Security firm says hackers can divert Vonage calls. Hackers with a Vonage Holdings Corp. phone subscriber’s name and telephone number could intercept Internet phone calls by exploiting a weakness in the system, a security firm said on Wednesday. A Vonage spokesman declined comment on the report by Sipera Systems of Richardson, Texas, which said it informed Vonage of the problem more than a month ago. Vonage had not responded, he said. Vonage, which has almost 2.5 million customers, was a pioneer in the business of selling low-cost phone services that use the Internet to connect calls instead of traditional phone wires. While crooks have been long been able to hack into traditional phone lines, they’ve had to physically tap into telephone wires to do so. Without proper security measures, Internet phone providers risk exposing their customers to such attacks from far away as hackers use the Web to access their networks, said Sipera’s founder and chief technology officer of Sipera. “This guy could be in Russia and Vonage thinks it's John Smith. People think they're calling John Smith and instead they get this guy,” he said.
Source:

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN2416024920071025?feedType=RSS &feedName=technologyNews

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Daily Report

The Associated Press reports that a dump used for toxic waste, which was shut down in 1979, might be the cause of cancer and other serious diseases that residents living near the plant have developed over the years. Health officials are now investigating if these suspicions are accurate. (See item 4)

Newsday reports that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections could develop into a major health crisis, according to doctors. They say that the organism has caused infections in hospitals for years, but now that it has spread to communities, infecting people in gyms, schools and day care centers, it might lead to a major crisis. The doctors also expressed concern because of the lack of new antibiotics to treat this specific strain. (See item 24)

Information Technology

27. October 23, IDG News Service – (National) ID thieves have a 50-50 chance of going to prison. If you are a convicted identity thief, you have about a 50 percent chance of avoiding jail. That is one of the findings of a new study of closed U.S. Secret Service case files, released Monday by Utica College's Center for Identity Management and Information Protection. This is the first time researchers have been allowed to sift through the Secret Service’s data. The study's authors based their findings on an analysis of 500 closed Secret Service cases. “Prosecutors had a slightly better chance of sending a convicted identity thief to prison than not (51 percent) and could expect to see the imprisoned offender sentenced to three years or less of incarceration,” the report said. The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since the Center's creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime. Technology like printers, mobile phones, and computers were used in about half of the cases, but the Internet was the exclusive tool of ID thieves only about 10 percent of the time. The median loss from identity theft was just over $31,000, but in one case, investigated by the Secret Service's Dallas field office, the defendant spent millions on luxury vehicles and then managed to set up shell companies and defraud investors. Losses totaled $13 million. “In general,” however, “the more offenders involved in the case, the higher the victim loss,” the study stated. According to Javelin Strategy & Research, identity theft cost U.S. businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/23/ID-thieves-50-50-chance-of-prison_1.html

28. October 23, The Associated Press – (International) British, Dutch police close pirate site. British and Dutch police shut down what they say is one the world’s biggest online sources of pirated music Tuesday and arrested the Web site’s 24-year-old suspected operator. The invitation-only OiNK Web site specialized in distributing albums leaked before their official release by record companies, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said.
Many among OiNK’s estimated 180,000 members paid donations “to upload or download albums, often weeks before their release, and within hours albums would be distributed through public forums and blogs across the Internet.” Users were invited to the site if they could prove they had music to share, the IFPI said. The IFPI said more than 60 major albums were leaked on OiNK so far this year, making it the primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music. Prerelease piracy is considered particularly damaging to music sales as it leads to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the Internet months before the release. Police in Cleveland, in northeast England, said they were tracing the money generated through the Web site, expected to amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The arrest of a 24-year-old IT worker at a house in Middlesbrough, northeast England, followed a two-year investigation by Dutch and British police and raids coordinated by Interpol. Cleveland police said the man, whose name was not released, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law. OiNK’s servers, in Amsterdam, were shut down by Dutch police, the IFPI said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071023/ap_on_hi_te/britain_pirate_web_site;_ylt=Apf5aM4kxV_81NcBxsmuS0MjtBAF

29. October 22, Computerworld – (Colorado) Update: World Series ticket sales to resume after Colo. stall. After a 26-hour delay, the Colorado Rockies baseball team will at last be able to sell its tickets for World Series home games at Coors Field. Sales should begin Tuesday at noon MDT on the Rockies’ Web site. When its automated ticketing vendor’s servers crashed early Monday morning, the Rockies struck out as they tried to sell tickets to three home World Series games, set to begin on Saturday. “It’s been an extremely frustrating day for our fans and the entire Rockies’ organization,” said the Rockies’ team president in a statement. “Our Web site, and ultimately our fans and our organization, were the victim of an external, malicious attack that shut down the system and kept our fans from being able to purchase their World Series tickets.” The National League team, which will face the American League champion, the Boston Red Sox, beginning Wednesday night in Boston, had announced last week that it would sell its World Series tickets via an online process to make it fair for all ticket buyers for the first World Series to involve a Colorado team. Only about 500 tickets had been sold online before the outage occurred, 10 minutes after the tickets went on sale Monday.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043598&intsrc=hm_list

30. October 22, Computerworld – (National) Adobe patches critical PDF vulnerability. Adobe Systems Inc. patched its Reader and Acrobat programs Monday to fix a flaw that exposed most Windows XP users to exploits arriving in malicious PDF files. The patches are included in updates to Reader, the for-free PDF rendering utility, and Acrobat, Adobe’s full-featured application; both have been tagged as Version 8.1.1. “Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that could allow an attacker who successfully
exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system,” Adobe warned in the bulletin that detailed the patch availability. “A malicious file must be loaded in Adobe Reader or Acrobat by the end user for an attacker to exploit these vulnerabilities.” Only users of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP who have Internet Explorer 7 installed are at risk of such attacks, Adobe added. The patches come a little more than two weeks after Adobe acknowledged the bug and posted a complicated work-around that required users to edit the Windows registry.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=security&articleId=9043543&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

Communications Sector

31. October 23, The Associated Press – (International) Report: China starts work on first direct undersea cable to US. A group of phone companies has begun constructing the first undersea telecommunications cable directly linking China with the United States, a news report said Tuesday. The fiber-optic cable will go into operation next July ahead of the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government's Xinhua News Agency said. The project, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, comes amid explosive growth in telephone and Internet traffic between China and the United States. Its developers say it will have 60 times the capacity of current cable connections between the two countries. Current U.S.-Chinese cable links run through Japan, but Beijing sees Tokyo as a regional rival and has long wanted an independent connection to the United States. Construction of the new cable began Monday in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao, Xinhua said. Its developers are state-owned China Telecom Ltd., China Netcom Ltd. and China Unicom Ltd., Verizon Communications Inc. of the United States, Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom Co. and South Korea’s KT Corp. The cable is to have connections to South Korea and Taiwan, but none to Japan, according to its developers. Verizon said last year the system would extend more than 18,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) and represent an investment of US$500 million. The route of the cable is intended to minimize potential disruption from earthquakes by avoiding seismically active areas, Xinhua said. A quake in January severed an undersea cable near Taiwan, disrupting communications throughout Asia.
Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/23/business/AS-TEC-China-US-Sea-Cable.php

32. October 22, Newsfactor.com – (National) Comcast impersonates users to control P2P traffic. Comcast interferes with peer-to-peer traffic on its cable network by masquerading as users and resetting connections, The Associated Press reported on Friday. Apparently in an effort to maintain quality of service, Comcast cut off uploads of files to BitTorrent and other P2P networks. While observers agree that an Internet service provider needs to be able manage its traffic, the way Comcast is going about this -- by impersonating customers -- is troubling to many. “Comcast is in an interesting position because the amount of outbound and inbound traffic is constrained in their network,” said the CEO of Sonic.net, a California internet service provider. “In an asynchronous network, as the amount of outbound traffic grows, inbound rates will decrease.” Thus in order to maintain service quality for inbound traffic, which is important to all users, Comcast is throttling outbound P2P traffic. But the way Comcast is doing it -- by “injecting TCP resets that are forged as coming from the customer,” according to the Sonic.net exec -- is “pretty weird.” The AP story offered an apt metaphor: it is as if an AT&T operator broke into a phone conversation and impersonated one of the speakers, saying, “I have to go now, goodbye” and closed the connection. “That’s a fundamental line that’s been crossed,” he said. Yet, he added, Comcast might have no choice. “The peer-to-peer software is so insidious in how it tries to work around throttling, that forging may be the only way to stop the traffic,” he said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/56178;_ylt=Aj8vkLHNYtXJLkfgI0T.HrsjtBAF

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Daily Report

· The Associated Press reports that a dump used for toxic waste, which was shut down in 1979, might be the cause of cancer and other serious diseases that residents living near the plant have developed over the years. Health officials are now investigating if these suspicions are accurate. (See item 4)

· Newsday reports that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections could develop into a major health crisis, according to doctors. They say that the organism has caused infections in hospitals for years, but now that it has spread to communities, infecting people in gyms, schools and day care centers, it might lead to a major crisis. The doctors also expressed concern because of the lack of new antibiotics to treat this specific strain. (See item 24)

Information Technology

27. October 23, IDG News Service – (National) ID thieves have a 50-50 chance of going to prison. If you are a convicted identity thief, you have about a 50 percent chance of avoiding jail. That is one of the findings of a new study of closed U.S. Secret Service case files, released Monday by Utica College's Center for Identity Management and Information Protection. This is the first time researchers have been allowed to sift through the Secret Service’s data. The study's authors based their findings on an analysis of 500 closed Secret Service cases. “Prosecutors had a slightly better chance of sending a convicted identity thief to prison than not (51 percent) and could expect to see the imprisoned offender sentenced to three years or less of incarceration,” the report said. The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since the Center's creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime. Technology like printers, mobile phones, and computers were used in about half of the cases, but the Internet was the exclusive tool of ID thieves only about 10 percent of the time. The median loss from identity theft was just over $31,000, but in one case, investigated by the Secret Service's Dallas field office, the defendant spent millions on luxury vehicles and then managed to set up shell companies and defraud investors. Losses totaled $13 million. “In general,” however, “the more offenders involved in the case, the higher the victim loss,” the study stated. According to Javelin Strategy & Research, identity theft cost U.S. businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/23/ID-thieves-50-50-chance-of-prison_1.html

28. October 23, The Associated Press – (International) British, Dutch police close pirate site. British and Dutch police shut down what they say is one the world’s biggest online sources of pirated music Tuesday and arrested the Web site’s 24-year-old suspected operator. The invitation-only OiNK Web site specialized in distributing albums leaked before their official release by record companies, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said. Many among OiNK’s estimated 180,000 members paid donations “to upload or download albums, often weeks before their release, and within hours albums would be distributed through public forums and blogs across the Internet.” Users were invited to the site if they could prove they had music to share, the IFPI said. The IFPI said more than 60 major albums were leaked on OiNK so far this year, making it the primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music. Prerelease piracy is considered particularly damaging to music sales as it leads to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the Internet months before the release. Police in Cleveland, in northeast England, said they were tracing the money generated through the Web site, expected to amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The arrest of a 24-year-old IT worker at a house in Middlesbrough, northeast England, followed a two-year investigation by Dutch and British police and raids coordinated by Interpol. Cleveland police said the man, whose name was not released, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law. OiNK’s servers, in Amsterdam, were shut down by Dutch police, the IFPI said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071023/ap_on_hi_te/britain_pirate_web_site;_ylt=Apf5aM4kxV_81NcBxsmuS0MjtBAF

29. October 22, Computerworld – (Colorado) Update: World Series ticket sales to resume after Colo. stall. After a 26-hour delay, the Colorado Rockies baseball team will at last be able to sell its tickets for World Series home games at Coors Field. Sales should begin Tuesday at noon MDT on the Rockies’ Web site. When its automated ticketing vendor’s servers crashed early Monday morning, the Rockies struck out as they tried to sell tickets to three home World Series games, set to begin on Saturday. “It’s been an extremely frustrating day for our fans and the entire Rockies’ organization,” said the Rockies’ team president in a statement. “Our Web site, and ultimately our fans and our organization, were the victim of an external, malicious attack that shut down the system and kept our fans from being able to purchase their World Series tickets.” The National League team, which will face the American League champion, the Boston Red Sox, beginning Wednesday night in Boston, had announced last week that it would sell its World Series tickets via an online process to make it fair for all ticket buyers for the first World Series to involve a Colorado team. Only about 500 tickets had been sold online before the outage occurred, 10 minutes after the tickets went on sale Monday.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043598&intsrc=hm_list

30. October 22, Computerworld – (National) Adobe patches critical PDF vulnerability. Adobe Systems Inc. patched its Reader and Acrobat programs Monday to fix a flaw that exposed most Windows XP users to exploits arriving in malicious PDF files. The patches are included in updates to Reader, the for-free PDF rendering utility, and Acrobat, Adobe’s full-featured application; both have been tagged as Version 8.1.1. “Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system,” Adobe warned in the bulletin that detailed the patch availability. “A malicious file must be loaded in Adobe Reader or Acrobat by the end user for an attacker to exploit these vulnerabilities.” Only users of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP who have Internet Explorer 7 installed are at risk of such attacks, Adobe added. The patches come a little more than two weeks after Adobe acknowledged the bug and posted a complicated work-around that required users to edit the Windows registry.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=security&articleId=9043543&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

Communications Sector

31. October 23, The Associated Press – (International) Report: China starts work on first direct undersea cable to US. A group of phone companies has begun constructing the first undersea telecommunications cable directly linking China with the United States, a news report said Tuesday. The fiber-optic cable will go into operation next July ahead of the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government's Xinhua News Agency said. The project, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, comes amid explosive growth in telephone and Internet traffic between China and the United States. Its developers say it will have 60 times the capacity of current cable connections between the two countries. Current U.S.-Chinese cable links run through Japan, but Beijing sees Tokyo as a regional rival and has long wanted an independent connection to the United States. Construction of the new cable began Monday in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao, Xinhua said. Its developers are state-owned China Telecom Ltd., China Netcom Ltd. and China Unicom Ltd., Verizon Communications Inc. of the United States, Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom Co. and South Korea’s KT Corp. The cable is to have connections to South Korea and Taiwan, but none to Japan, according to its developers. Verizon said last year the system would extend more than 18,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) and represent an investment of US$500 million. The route of the cable is intended to minimize potential disruption from earthquakes by avoiding seismically active areas, Xinhua said. A quake in January severed an undersea cable near Taiwan, disrupting communications throughout Asia.
Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/23/business/AS-TEC-China-US-Sea-Cable.php

32. October 22, Newsfactor.com – (National) Comcast impersonates users to control P2P traffic. Comcast interferes with peer-to-peer traffic on its cable network by masquerading as users and resetting connections, The Associated Press reported on Friday. Apparently in an effort to maintain quality of service, Comcast cut off uploads of files to BitTorrent and other P2P networks. While observers agree that an Internet service provider needs to be able manage its traffic, the way Comcast is going about this -- by impersonating customers -- is troubling to many. “Comcast is in an interesting position because the amount of outbound and inbound traffic is constrained in their network,” said the CEO of Sonic.net, a California internet service provider. “In an asynchronous network, as the amount of outbound traffic grows, inbound rates will decrease.” Thus in order to maintain service quality for inbound traffic, which is important to all users, Comcast is throttling outbound P2P traffic. But the way Comcast is doing it -- by “injecting TCP resets that are forged as coming from the customer,” according to the Sonic.net exec -- is “pretty weird.” The AP story offered an apt metaphor: it is as if an AT&T operator broke into a phone conversation and impersonated one of the speakers, saying, “I have to go now, goodbye” and closed the connection. “That’s a fundamental line that’s been crossed,” he said. Yet, he added, Comcast might have no choice. “The peer-to-peer software is so insidious in how it tries to work around throttling, that forging may be the only way to stop the traffic,” he said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/56178;_ylt=Aj8vkLHNYtXJLkfgI0T.HrsjtBAF

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Daily Report

· USA Today reports that changes in a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) policy, requiring pre-employment background checks for all new employees, are stirring controversy among airport representatives. Prior to October 1, when the new rule was enforced, the employees were issued IDs and could begin working while the clearances were pending. Because of the change, some airports reportedly do not have enough staff to process passengers or check people and luggage. (See item 10)

· According to The Associated Press, Georgia’s governor declared a state of emergency Saturday for the northern third of the state and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area. The emergency declaration might lead to the use of state funds allocated for drought. (See item 22)

Information Technology

30. October 22, IDG News Service – (National) With attack code circulating, RealPlayer fix coming. One day after Symantec researchers discovered software that attacked a critical unpatched vulnerability in RealNetworks’ media player, Real says that a fix for the issue is imminent. “Real has created a patch for RealPlayer 10.5 and RealPlayer 11 that addresses the vulnerability identified by Symantec,” wrote RealNetworks General Manager of Product Development in a Friday blog posting. “Real will make this patch available to users via this blog and our security update page later today,” he said. Users of RealOne Player, RealOne Player v2, and RealPlayer 10 should upgrade to the 10.5 version of the product or the RealPlayer 11 beta code and should install the patch, he said. The attack exploits a flaw in an ActiveX browser helper object, software that RealPlayer employs to help users who are experiencing technical difficulties, so the PC must be using the Internet Explorer browser to be affected by this particular attack, Symantec said. The attack only works on Windows systems, RealNetworks said. Linux, Mac and RealPlayer 8 users are not affected. Attackers were using a complicated network of advertising Web sites to launch the attack from a Web site that has been spotted hosting malicious code several times over the past two years, Symantec said. Users who do not have the patch can turn off ActiveScripting within IE as a workaround to the problem. Very technical users can also set kill bit on the Class identifier (CLSID) FDC7A535-4070-4B92-A0EA-D9994BCC0DC5 to disable the ActiveX control, Symantec said.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/22/RealPlayer-fix-coming_1.html

31. October 22, Computerworld – (California) IT staff acts as wildfire advances on Pepperdine’s data center. The CIO of Pepperdine University had little warning that a wildfire was soon to threaten the campus’ data center when he woke without power at 5 a.m. Sunday. Within a matter of hours, brush fires came within 100 feet of the data center -- and there was a point, he said, where “we had serious concern that the data center itself was going to be jeopardized.” The CIO quickly left for the data center and, as he drove to it, could see light from the fire on the other side of a ridge. Other administrators were responding as well, and by 5:30 a.m., the campus administration had called a meeting of the university’s Emergency Operations Committee. Wildfires are an ongoing threat in the area, and the university is prepared for that contingency, as well as other threats. It routinely sends its backup tapes to Iron Mountain Inc. for protection. In addition, the latest tape backup copies were moved to a fireproof safe. The ERP applications were shut down, and the hard drives were removed and also safely stored. All that work was completed in 35 minutes, he said. It was still before 8 a.m. While the IT staff scrambled, the fire advanced toward the data center building and nearby university administration building. Firefighters from Los Angeles County and other jurisdictions acted immediately. There were about 25 firefighters in the way of the advancing fire “whose entire goal was to protect the buildings,” he said. “They were able to contain those fires and keep them from spreading further,” he said. Pepperdine’s University Data Center never went offline, ensuring the campus of network services, including voice communications.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043421&intsrc=hm_list

32. October 21, IDG News Service – (National) Storm Worm now just a squall. The Storm Worm’s days may be numbered, according to a University of California researcher. The researcher said that, despite the intense publicity that the Storm network of infected computers has received, it has actually been shrinking steadily and is a shadow of its former self. On Saturday, he presented his findings at the ToorCon hacker conference in San Diego. Storm is not really a computer worm. It is a network of computers that have been infected via malicious e-mail messages and are centrally controlled via the Overnet peer-to-peer protocol. The researcher said he has developed software that crawls through the Storm network and thinks that he has a pretty accurate estimate of how big Storm really is. Some estimates have put Storm at 50 million computers, a number that would give its controllers access to more processing power than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. But the real story is significantly less terrifying, he said. In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time. He guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has existed, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043419&intsrc=hm_list

33. October 19, CNN – (International) Official: International hackers going after U.S. networks. About 140 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to hack into the computer networks of the U.S. government and U.S. companies, a top counterintelligence official said. The national counterintelligence executive told CNN it is not accurate to blame only the Chinese government for recent penetrations of government computer systems. Because it is easy for hackers to disguise where an attack originates, he said, the best course of action is to tighten up one’s own networks rather than to place blame. The nation’s electronic systems are too easy to hack, and the number of world-class hackers is “multiplying at bewildering speed,” he said. That, he said, has transformed the nature of counterintelligence: “If you can exfiltrate massive amounts of information electronically from the comfort of your own office on another continent, why incur the expense and risk of running a traditional espionage operation?” He also warned that hackers could create chaos by manipulating information in electronic systems the government, military and private industry rely on. “Our water and sewer systems, electricity grids, financial markets, payroll systems, air and ground traffic control systems ... are all electronically controlled, electronically dependent, and subject to sophisticated attacks by both state-sponsored and freelance terrorists,” he said. The government must develop a better system for warning the private sector and universities about attacks, he said, and some laws might need to change: “We’ve got to rethink the adequacy of our legal authorities to deal with the cyber thieves and the vandals who I call the Barbary pirates of the 21st century.”
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/19/cyber.threats/index.html

Communications Sector

34. October 21, IDG News Service – (National) AT&T sues Vonage for patent infringement. - AT&T Inc. on Friday filed a lawsuit against voice-over-IP (VoIP) provider Vonage Holdings Corp. seeking damages for alleged patent infringement. The lawsuit comes just days after Vonage settled a patent-infringement lawsuit with telecommunications provider Sprint Nextel Corp. In a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, AT&T alleged that Vonage willfully infringed an AT&T patent related to telephone systems that allow people to make VoIP calls using standard telephone devices. In the legal filing, AT&T said it tried to reach an agreement with Vonage to license the patent but failed, which forced the lawsuit. Vonage announced on October 8 that it settled its suit with Sprint Nextel for $80 million. As part of that agreement, Vonage agreed to license VoIP patents from Sprint, including more than 100 patents covering technology for connecting calls from a traditional phone network to an IP network. Vonage is also in the process of resolving a patent-infringement dispute with Verizon Communications Inc. Earlier this year, a court found that Vonage had infringed on Verizon patents and ordered an injunction that could have prevented Vonage from signing up new customers. Vonage won an injunction staying the order and is appealing the original infringement ruling. Vonage in August said it was close to rolling out work-arounds for two of the three patents Verizon claimed. Vonage is one of the largest independent VoIP providers in the U.S., with nearly 2.5 million customers.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=security&articleId=9043420&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top

35. October 20, RCR Wireless News – (National) FTC works to quash call list urban legend. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) faces a dilemma as it once again attempts to kill a wireless urban legend that just won’t die. “The Federal Trade Commission today reiterated that despite the claims made in e-mails circulating on the Internet, consumers should not be concerned that their cellular phone numbers will be released to telemarketers in the near future, and that it is not necessary to register cellular phone numbers on the national Do Not Call Registry to be protected from most telemarketing calls to cellular phones,” the agency stated. While the Do Not Call list accepts registrations of landline and wireless numbers alike, the Federal Communications Commission has a permanent ban on telemarketers using automated dialers to call cellular phone numbers. There are 145 million wireline and wireless numbers in the registry. The FTC has repeatedly posted “The Truth about Cellphones and the Do Not Call Registry” advisory several times since the program was crafted by the Federal Communications Commission and FTC in 2003. The agencies attribute rumors about telemarketers getting their hands on mobile-phone numbers and other falsehoods associated with the Do Not Call registry to an industry effort aborted several years ago to launch a wireless 411 directory. The FTC does not presently highlight the fact that under current law consumers must re-register with the Do Not Call Registry. The reason is the agency does not know whether legislation to make the registry permanent will be approved by Congress this year. In the meantime, an FTC spokesman said a major campaign to remind consumers to re-register will be rolled out in early 2008 if lawmakers fail to get legislation approved.
Source: http://www.rcrnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071020/SUB/71019016/1005

Monday, October 22, 2007

Daily Report

· Local Florida news station, WKMG 6, reports that several individuals have been arrested recently in Florida for using specially altered trucks to siphon off fuel from gas stations. Police believe that the trucks may be linked to an organized crime ring. (See item 1)

· Government Executive writes that witness testifying before a Wednesday of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, Science and Technology said that current regulations to protect control systems supporting power plants nationwide fall short of federal recommendations, posing a serious threat to electric infrastructure and national security. (See item 3)

Information Technology

26. October 19, E-Security Planet – (National) Code Green brings data loss prevention to SMBs. A new Data Loss Prevention (DLP) appliance has been launched by Code Green Networks Inc. of Santa Clara, California. The new CI-750 appliance enables small offices with 50-250 users and distributed enterprises to protect sensitive data leaving the organization. The company’s founder says small businesses face identical challenges as larger organizations in terms of protecting confidential data and safeguarding intellectual property - including having to comply with the same federal and state regulations and guidelines as organizations with more resources at their disposal. This is especially true with new guidelines set forth by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for protecting personal information, and recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) regarding the protection of electronic communications for e-Discovery purposes. However, unlike their large enterprise counterparts, small businesses typically do not have in-house security experts or compliance officers advising them on what they should be doing to secure their data. As a result, they are not quite in step with their larger industry counterparts when it comes to deploying technology and instituting and enforcing data protection policies. The appliance costs $10,000, which the company’s owner says is a price point intended for small businesses.
Source:
http://www.esecurityplanet.com/prevention/article.php/3706186

27. October 19, Computer World – (National) Attacks exploiting RealPlayer zero day in progress. Attackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in RealPlayer in order to infect Windows machines running Internet Explorer, Symantec Corp. said late Thursday. The security company issued an alert that rated the threat with its highest possible score. According to a warning issued to customers of its DeepSight threat network, Symantec said an ActiveX control installed by RealNetworks Inc.’s RealPlayer program is flawed. When combined with Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser -- which relies on ActiveX controls to extend its functionality -- the bug can be exploited and malicious code downloaded to any PC that wanders to a specially crafted site. Only systems on which both RealPlayer and IE have been installed are vulnerable. Symantec also referenced a blog that had posted some information about the RealPlayer vulnerability Wednesday morning. The blogger, identified only as Roger, claimed that the NASA space agency has warned workers not to use IE because of an unspecified problem with RealPlayer. Roger quoted from what he claimed was a NASA bulletin. “The malware appears to be spreading through a large variety of common and highly-respected Internet sites,” the NASA warning reportedly said. “However it does not appear these sites are themselves infected. The affected sites are serving solely as a mechanism to attract potential victims.” NASA’s public affairs team at the Ames Research Center in northern California was not available for comment Thursday night.
Source:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043319&intsrc=news_ts_head

Communications Sector

28. October 19, BBC – (International) Mobile phone use backed on planes. Cellular phone use is currently prohibited on planes because there is evidence that it interferes with onboard communication and navigation systems. Research published in 2003 found that mobile phone signals skewed navigation bearing displays by up to five degrees. But now, regulators around Europe are calling for consultation on the potential introduction of a technology that permits mobile calls without risk of interference with aircraft systems. If given the go ahead, the service would allow calls to be made when a plane is more than 3,000 meters high. Individual airlines would then decide if they wanted to introduce the technology. The European Union has recommended to member states that the plan go ahead and space on the airwaves has been reserved for the technology. The proposed system utilizes an on-board base station in the plane which communicates with passengers’ own handsets. The base station - called a pico cell - is low power and creates a network area big enough to encompass the cabin of the plane. The base station routes phone traffic to a satellite, which is in turn connected to mobile networks on the ground. A network control unit on the plane is used to ensure that mobiles in the plane do not connect to any base stations on the ground. It blocks the signal from the ground so that phones cannot connect and remain in an idle state. The regulator said that the technology could be implemented next year.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7050576.stm

29. October 18, The Star Tribune – (Minnesota) Globalstar signs agreement to increase satellite messaging capacity to 10 times and further expand Simplex data coverage. Globalstar, Inc., a provider of mobile satellite voice and data services to businesses, governments, and individuals, today announced that Radyne Corporation business unit AeroAstro will supply Globalstar with the necessary network upgrades that will enhance both the receiver sensitivity and the overall customer messaging capacity of the Globalstar Simplex data network. According to the recently signed agreement, AeroAstro will provide Globalstar with the ground network upgrades needed to expand the current subscriber messaging capacity of the Globalstar Simplex data network by 10 times and increase receiver sensitivity of the network by up to 40 percent. Increased receiver sensitivity will further expand the geographic coverage area of Globalstar’s gateway earth stations and is expected to improve Simplex message transmission reliability, which already exceeds 99 percent in the gateways’ primary coverage area. Deliveries of the necessary upgrades are scheduled to begin in early 2008. Globalstar’s Simplex data network is used to support a variety of aviation flight-following, emergency asset, fleet and personal tracking applications. Simplex data modem integrated solutions are also used for a number of remote monitoring and alarm applications, both within and beyond the reach of traditional wireless and terrestrial infrastructure. Information such as GPS location co-ordinates, remote status and other sensor information can be sent to customers using the Globalstar Simplex network.
Source:
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/primenewswire/129109.htm