Department of Homeland Security Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Complete DHS Daily Report for April 8, 2009

Daily Report

Top Stories

 The Associated Press reports that a Massachusetts man was charged Friday with threatening to disable an electrical substation in Parkersburg, West Virginia. (See item 5)


5. April 3, Associated Press – (West Virginia) Police: Mass. man threatened to darken West Virginia city. A Massachusetts man is in jail in West Virginia, accused of threatening to turn out the lights in Parkersburg, West Virginia by disabling an electrical substation. The man is charged with threatening to commit a terrorist act. A Wood County deputy alleges in a criminal complaint that the 27-year-old told an Allegheny Power employee in February that he planned to knock out the city’s lights. Authorities said they found schematic drawings, a wiring harness with switches, and items used to make an explosive device inside the man’s vehicle. He allegedly told police that he was upset because of the President’s “new laws.” He was being held on April 3 on $15,000 bond. His attorney was not immediately available for comment. Source: http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2009_04_03_Police:_Mass__man_threatened_to_darken_West_Virginia_city/srvc=home&position=recent


 According to the Associated Press, a man suspected of stealing a plane in Canada and flying erratically across three states was trying to commit suicide, hoping he would be shot down by military fighter planes, a Missouri State trooper said Tuesday. (See item 10)


10. April 7, Associated Press – (International) Stolen plane from Canada escorted by U.S. fighters. A man suspected of stealing a plane in Canada and flying erratically across three states was trying to commit suicide, hoping he would be shot down by military fighter planes, a state trooper said April 7. The plane was tracked as a “flight safety issue” and was not believed to be a terrorist threat, said a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NAADC). The Missouri state trooper who arrested the pilot said, “He made a statement that he was trying to commit suicide and he didn’t have the courage to do it himself. And his idea was to fly the aircraft into the United States, where he would be shot down.” The plane was reported stolen the afternoon of April 6 from Confederation College Flight School at Thunder Bay International Airport in Ontario. It was intercepted by F-16 fighters from the Wisconsin National Guard after crossing into the state near the Michigan state line. The pilot was flying erratically and did not communicate with the fighter pilots. The pilot acknowledged seeing the F-16s but did not obey their nonverbal commands to follow them. The plane’s path over Wisconsin prompted a brief, precautionary evacuation of the Wisconsin capitol in Madison, although there were few workers in the building at the time and the governor was not in town. The Cessna 172 continued south over Illinois and eastern Missouri before landing near Ellsinore. The plane landed about six hours after the reported theft, and had enough fuel for about eight hours of flight, NAADC officials said.

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iC5xvmRlmutpYgkeMsfKk4QV4qjwD97DK8H01


Details

Banking and Finance Sector

7. April 6, Bloomberg – (New York) Cuomo sues Merkin for shifting $2.4 billion to Madoff. The New York Attorney General sued a financier and his Gabriel Capital Corp. for secretly placing $2.4 billion of client funds with an individual who used the money in the largest Ponzi scheme ever. The financier steered the assets to the individual who used the money in the Ponzi scheme in exchange for $470 million in fees, the New York Attorney General alleged in a complaint filed Monday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Investors including prominent charities entrusted their funds to the financier who held himself out to be an “investing guru” when in reality he was “but a master marketer,” the New York Attorney General said in the complaint. Other entities of the financier included the Ariel Fund, Ascot Fund Ltd. and Gabriel, his management company. Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a9MY19UAxa3g&refer=news


8. April 6, Reuters – (International) SEC charges “Chinese Warren Buffett” of Ponzi scheme. U.S. securities regulators charged a Toronto-based fund manager, who describes himself as the “Chinese Warren Buffett,” and his hedge fund with operating a multimillion dollar investment fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on April 6. The SEC, which obtained an asset freeze to halt the alleged fraud, charged the fund manager and his Canadian-based hedge fund with operating a Ponzi scheme, where funds from new investors were used to pay purported profits to other investors. Since as early as 2004, the fund manager has raised as much as $75 million from more than 200 investors for his hedge fund called the Oversea Chinese Fund Limited Partnership, the SEC said. The fund manager told investors in February 2009 that, in aneffort to conceal substantial trading losses and attract new investors to his hedge fund, he posted false profits on investors’ account statements and used funds from new investors to pay out at least $8 million in “fake” profits to others, the SEC said. Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/usTopNews/idUKTRE5355TJ20090406


9. April 6, Bloomington Herald Times – (Indiana) Peoples, Fifth Third Bank calls are scams, bank officers warn. A phone-calling scam is afoot in the Bloomington and Ellettsville area, with customers and non-customers of People’s State Bank being asked for “verification” of credit card or account information. The executive vice president of the bank in Ellettsville said April 6 that automated calls and e-mails are going out to people asking for account information. The requests are false and people should hang up or refuse to enter requested information. He cautioned everyone to be aware of scammers, which have apparently targeted other community banks as victims. “I don’t think we’re the only ones,” he said. A representative of Fifth Third Bank in Indianapolis said Monroe customers of her bank have also been the target of phishing scams. “This morning, Fifth Third has fielded about 30 calls already in our Bloomington financial centers regarding a phishing scam via an automated phone message,” the representative said via e-mail. “The calls are coming from a person impersonating themselves as a representative of State Bank, Fifth Third Bank or it simply states ‘Your banking information has been compromised’ and doesn’t state a particular financial institution,” the representative said. Source: http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/3179920


Information Technology


Nothing to report.

Communications Sector

29. April 7, Cellular News – (International) World’s first femtocell standard published by 3GPP. Three trade bodies, the Femto Forum, 3GPP, and the Broadband Forum have jointly announced that the world’s first femtocell standard has been officially published by 3GPP, paving the way for interoperability between different vendors’ access points and femto gateways. The new standard, which forms part of 3GPP’s Release 8, and interdependent with Broadband Forum extensions to its Technical Report-069 (TR-069), has been completed in just 12 months following cooperation between the three groups. The new femtocell standard covers four main areas: network architecture; radio and interference aspects (both completed last December); femtocell management/provisioning and security (finalized this month). In terms of network architecture, the crucial interface between potentially millions of femtocells and gateways in the network core has been called Iuh. This re-uses existing 3GPP UMTS protocols and extends them to support the needs of high-volume femtocell deployments. The new standard has adopted the Broadband Forum’s TR-069 management protocol, which has been extended to incorporate a new data model for femtocells developed collaboratively by Femto Forum and Broadband Forum members and published by the Broadband Forum as Technical Report 196 (TR-196). TR-069 is already widely used in fixed broadband networks and in set-top boxes and will allow mobile operators to simplify deployment and enable automated remote provisioning, diagnostics-checking, and software updates. The standard also uses a combination of security measures including IKEv2 (Internet Key Exchange v2) and IPsec (IP Security) protocols to authenticate the operator and subscriber and then guarantee the privacy of the data exchanged. Source: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/36895.php?source=rss