Department of Homeland Security Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report

Friday, April 17, 2009

Complete DHS Daily Report for April 17, 2009

Daily Report

Top Stories

 The Arizona Republic reports that a single-engine plane carrying two people made an emergency landing on an elementary school field in Phoenix, Arizona on Wednesday. The right wing of the plane struck a chain-link fence on the school playground. (See item 31)


31. April 15, Arizona Republic – (Arizona) Plane crash lands near school building in west Phoenix. A single-engine plane carrying two people made an emergency landing on an elementary school field in Phoenix on April 15. No one was injured in the landing. A 23-year-old student and 28-year-old flight instructor were flying the Cessna 152 in an area around the Glendale Municipal Airport when they reported engine trouble, a Federal Aviation Administration said. The pair decided they could not make it back to the airport and made an emergency landing just feet from the computer lab at Villa de Paz Elementary School around 9:30 a.m. The school is about one mile southeast of the airport. The right wing of the plane struck a chain-link fence on the school playground. Source: http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2009/04/15/20090415forced-landing0415.html


 According to CNET News, BlackBerry users around the country were without e-mail for about 3 hours in a nationwide outage on April 13 that affected users on all major wireless networks. (See item 36)


36. April 14, CNET News – (National) BlackBerry users experience e-mail outage. BlackBerry users around the country were without e-mail for about 3 hours in a nationwide outage April 13 that affected users on all major wireless networks. From about 1 p.m. to about 4 p.m., people who subscribe to a BlackBerry e-mail service through their wireless carrier instead of being offered the service through their companies could not send or receive e-mail or access the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site. They also were not able to create new accounts, access their Internet mailboxes, integrate third-party e-mail accounts, or view e-mail attachments during this time. A spokeswoman for Research in Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry devices and operates its push-e-mail service, said that “some customers experienced a delay receiving e-mail on April 14, but it wasn’t system-wide.” Service is now operating normally, she added. But a representative from Sprint Nextel confirmed the outage and said the outage also affected the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site. Subscribers on all four major U.S. wireless networks — AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless — complained that they had no access to e-mail until about 4 p.m., at which time they started getting a flood of e-mails that had been sent earlier in the day. Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/04/14/cnet.blackberry.email.outrage/


Details

Banking and Finance Sector

11. April 15, Network World – (National) Organized crime caused big data breach spike, says Verizon. A new study from Verizon Business claims that organized crime is responsible for a large increase in the number of breached corporate electronic records, which totaled roughly 285 million last year. According to the study, which Verizon Business compiled using data from the 90 confirmed corporate network breaches it recorded last year, roughly 93 percent of all records breached came from the financial sector. The company also says that nine out every 10 of these breaches involved “groups identified by law enforcement as engaged in organized crime.” Verizon says that the 285 million electronic records breached last year were more than the total number of records breached in the past four years combined. The reason for the sharp increase is that attacks on financial firms’ networks have become more sophisticated and successful, the company says. Although only 17 percent of the attacks studied by Verizon constituted “highly sophisticated” data breaches, these attacks were responsible for 95 percent of all records breached. Verizon says that cybercriminals are targeting financial service companies’ networks to get customers’ personal identification number (PIN) information in order to withdraw cash directly from their accounts. Cybercriminals are also selling PIN information on the black market, the company says. Overall, the study found that external sources were responsible for nearly three-fourths of the breached records, while internal sources accounted for 20 percent. Partner breaches, in which network security was compromised by a company’s business partner, accounted for 32 percent of all breaches. Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/041409-data-breach-organized-crime.html?hpg1=bn


12. April 15, Arizona Republic – (Arizona) Man uses threat of explosives to rob bank. A bank robber escaped with money from a U.S. Bank in Phoenix at 22nd Street and Camelback Road on April 15, leaving a suspicious object that forced police to close a busy intersection. Police received a call and responded to the robbery about 1:45 p.m., said a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department. The suspect entered the building, placed a bag he claimed contained explosives on the counter and demanded money. He then fled the scene, leaving the bagged device to preoccupy police. Officers closed the intersection outside the bank while bomb squads investigated the bag. The intersection reopened about 3:45 p.m., once the device was determined to be non-explosive, the spokesman said.

Source: http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2009/04/15/20090415abrk-bankrobbery0415.html


13. April 14, New York Times – (National) Banks get quiet assistance from FDIC debt program. A program approved last fall that let banks issue debt backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. enabled banks to continue to operate even as other businesses found it impossible to raise money. So far banks, including Goldman Sachs, have issued $300 billion in debt under the program. “It is an infinite subsidy. It is their franchise value,” said the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. Bank executives say their firms may not have survived without the program. Source: http://www.smartbrief.com/news/nyssa/storyDetails.jsp?issueid=C9D0C195-0D26-40F6-A5DD-CEE845291E11&copyid=532B16BC-F666-4EF7-812E-E938AEE79448


Information Technology


35. April 15, Computerworld – (International) VMware bug allows Windows hack to attack Macs. A bug in VMware’s Fusion virtualization software could be used to run malicious code on a Mac by exploiting Windows in a virtual machine, a security researcher said on April 15. VMware has released Fusion 2.0.4 to plug the hole. According to an exploit researcher at Immunity Inc., a critical vulnerability in VMware’s virtual machine display function can be used to read and write memory on the “host” operating system, the OS running the physical hardware. The researcher crafted an exploit for Immunity’s customers and posted a video clip that demonstrates an attack on a machine running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as the host operating system, and Windows XP as the “guest,” the OS running in a virtual machine. “This is indeed a guest-to-host exploit,” the researcher said in an e-mail on April 15. “It uses several vulnerabilities in the ‘Display functions’ (as VMware put it) that allow [someone] to read and write arbitrary memory in the host. Thus the guest can run some code on the host, effectively bypassing ASLR and DEP on Vista SP1.” The same tactics can be employed against a guest operating system, say, Windows XP, running in Fusion on a Mac powered by Apple’s Mac OS X, the researcher confirmed. “The vulnerability is also present in VMware Fusion and as such would allow a guest (Windows or Linux) to run code on the Mac OS X host,” he said. Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131647&intsrc=news_ts_head

Communications Sector

36. April 14, CNET News – (National) BlackBerry users experience e-mail outage. BlackBerry users around the country were without e-mail for about 3 hours in a nationwide outage April 13 that affected users on all major wireless networks. From about 1 p.m. to about 4 p.m., people who subscribe to a BlackBerry e-mail service through their wireless carrier instead of being offered the service through their companies could not send or receive e-mail or access the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site. They also were not able to create new accounts, access their Internet mailboxes, integrate third-party e-mail accounts, or view e-mail attachments during this time. A spokeswoman for Research in Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry devices and operates its push-e-mail service, said that “some customers experienced a delay receiving e-mail on April 14, but it wasn’t system-wide.” Service is now operating normally, she added. But a representative from Sprint Nextel confirmed the outage and said the outage also affected the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site. Subscribers on all four major U.S. wireless networks — AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless — complained that they had no access to e-mail until about 4 p.m., at which time they started getting a flood of e-mails that had been sent earlier in the day. Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/04/14/cnet.blackberry.email.outrage/