Friday, January 14, 2011
Complete DHS Daily Report for January 14, 2011
Daily Report
Top Stories
• The South Florida Sun Sentinel reports 15 people, including 7 bankers, were charged with bribery, money laundering, and identity theft for participating in a scheme that resulted in $10 million in fraudulent bank loans. See item 12 below in the Banking and Finance Sector
• According to the Washington Post, shortly before Christmas, federal officials received a tip that a top terrorist was behind a plot to conceal bombs in thermos liners carried aboard planes. (See item 16)
16. January 13, Washington Post – (National) TSA tip: Suspect planned thermos bomb. Shortly before Christmas, federal officials received a tip that terrorists might be concealing bombs in thermos liners carried aboard planes, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) head said January 13. Addressing an American Bar Association committee in Washington D.C., he said he got a tip December 23 that a 28-year-old Saudi national who is on that country’s most-wanted list and was tied to the plot to explode a bomb disguised as toner cartridge on a cargo plane, was behind the plot to make a thermos bomb. “Anyone who has traveled with a thermos since then has been getting more screening,” the TSA head said. He also said he expected modification to controversial airport scanners and pat-down procedures this year to address privacy concerns. Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dr-gridlock/2011/01/tsa_says_screeners_to_be_modif.html
Details
Banking and Finance Sector
11. January 13, Associated Press – (California) College leader charged with stealing from students. A Southern California college program director has been charged with using a bogus bank account to steal $500,000 from students. Prosecutors said the 56-year-old suspect is being held on $3 million bail after he pleaded not guilty January 10 to two forgery counts and two identity theft counts, all of them felonies. The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin said the suspect is the director of Walnut’s Mt. San Antonio College fire technology program. A Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective said the suspect overcharged students for classes and deposited the money in a fraudulent bank account using Mt. San Antonio College’s tax identification number. Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/01/13/state/n071325S79.DTL
12. January 12, South Florida Sun Sentinel – (Florida) Broward assistant principal, former sheriff’s aide, 7 bankers among those ensnared in federal bank fraud probe. A Broward Schools assistant principal, a former sheriff’s investigative aide and seven Broward and Palm Beach County, Florida, bankers were ensnared in a sweeping undercover FBI investigation into alleged widespread bank fraud. A total of 15 defendants were charged January 12 in a scheme federal authorities said marks a new twist in the defrauding of South Florida banks while featuring bribery, money laundering, and identity theft. Using tactics commonly seen in home mortgage fraud cases, people fraudulently obtained small business loans and lines of credit by bribing corrupt bankers and submitting phony financial documents, a U.S. attorney said. The official who heads the FBI in South Florida said he anticipates dozens more people will be arrested on similar criminal charges in the coming months. The 2-year investigation centered on a man who ran a company called Palm Beach Business Consultants. The FBI said this suspect helped secure more than $10 million in fraudulent loans from 10 area banks. Source: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-01-12/news/fl-correa-bank-fraud-20110112_1_bank-fraud-fraudulent-loans-identity-theft
13. January 11, Washington Post – (Maryland) Robbery at White Oak credit union. Montgomery County, Maryland police are investigating a January 8 robbery at the Mid-Atlantic Federal Credit Union in White Oak, authorities said January 11. Two male suspects entered the Mid-Atlantic Federal Credit Union at 11140 New Hampshire Avenue at 10:42 a.m. wielding handguns and announcing a robbery, police said. Montgomery County Police detectives and the FBI are investigating the robbery. Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/crime-scene/montgomery/moco-robbery-investigated.html?hpid=newswell
14. January 11, United Press International – (National) FBI: Bank heists rose in third quarter. U.S. bank robberies increased in the third quarter of 2010, the FBI said January 11. The bureau reported 1,325 bank holdups, an increase from 1,212 in the same quarter of 2009. Money was taken in 90 percent of the incidents, totaling more than $9.3 million. Nearly $1.4 million was recovered and returned to financial institutions. Robbers most often struck on Fridays and between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Acts of violence accompanied 4 percent of the holdups, resulting in 4 deaths, 21 injuries and 9 people being taken hostage, the bureau said. The FBI said the South had the greatest number of reported holdups with 482. Source: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/01/11/FBI-Bank-heists-rose-in-third-quarter/UPI-83551294771276/
15. January 11, U.S. Department of Justice – (New York) Queens attorney pleads guilty in Manhattan federal court to participating in $23 million mortgage fraud scheme. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that a real estate attorney pled guilty January 10 before a U.S. District Judge in Manhattan federal court to a seven-count indictment charging him with conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, and six counts of bank fraud, in connection with a scheme that defrauded banks out of more than $23 million in home mortgage loans. The suspect made hundreds of thousands of dollars in illicit profits from the scheme, in which he worked closely with corrupt loan officers of GuyAmerican Funding, a mortgage brokerage firm in Queens, New York. The suspect is the ninth defendant convicted of participating in this mortgage fraud scheme. Source: http://newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel11/nyfo011111.htm
For another story, see item 42 below in Information Technology
Information Technology
39. January 13, Softpedia – (International) Critical security update released for Google Chrome. Chrome 8.0.552.334 was released as a security update for the stable channel of Google’s increasingly popular browser and contains fixes for a flurry of vulnerabilities. In total, there were 16 security issues patched, 2 of which were rated with medium risk, 13 with high, and 1 with critical. The critical flaw is a stale pointer in speech handling and its discovery is credited to a regular Chrome security contributor. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Critical-Security-Update-Released-for-Google-Chrome-177946.shtml
40. January 13, Softpedia – (International) Adobe will allow deleting Flash cookies from within browsers. Adobe has been working with browser vendors to develop a way of deleting Flash Player local shared objects (LSO), also known as Flash cookies, directly from browsers. Local shared objects are part of the local storage feature that rich Internet applications can use to store various settings or cached items. Security researchers have warned since several years ago that local storage can be abused for user tracking purposes. Flash LSOs, in particular, can be used to re-spawn tracking cookies. For example, a Web site can store a unique identifier in a plain text cookie and a LSO. If the user deletes the cookie through the browser controls and revisits the Web site, the ID can be read from the LSO used to recreate the cookie. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Adobe-Will-Allow-Deleting-Flash-Cookies-from-Within-the-Browsers-178031.shtml
41. January 13, H Security – (International) Wireshark updates address vulnerabilities. The Wireshark development team has released version 1.2.14 and 1.4.3 of its open source, cross-platform network protocol analyzer. According to the developers, the security updates address a high-risk vulnerability (CVE-2010-4538) that could allow a remote attacker to initiate a denial of service attack or possibly execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system. Affecting both the 1.2.x and 1.4.x branches of Wireshark, the issue is reportedly caused by a buffer overflow in ENTTEC (epan/dissectors/packet-enttec.c) — the vulnerability is said to be triggered by injecting a specially crafted ENTTEC DMX packet with Run Length Encoding compression. A buffer overflow issue in MAC-LTE has also been resolved in both versions. In version 1.4.3, a vulnerability in the ASN.1 BER dissector that could have caused Wireshark to exit prematurely has been corrected. Source: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Wireshark-updates-address-vulnerabilities-1168888.html
42. January 12, Softpedia – (International) Fake Miles & More emails lead to Zbot drive-by download. Security researchers warn about fake e-mails purporting to come from the Miles & More frequent flyer program and leading users to a Zbot drive-by download website. The rogue e-mails bear a subject of “ITINENERARY RECEIPT” and have the header spoofed to appear as originating from a memberservices[at]miles-and-more(dot)com address. The contained message suggests users’ credit cards were charged without their knowledge. “Thanks for the purchase! Booking number: LVSN50. Your credit card has been charged for $493.67. Please print PASSENGER ITINERARY RECEIPT by logging into your Miles account by clicking the link below,” the e-mails read. According to researchers from BitDefender who analyzed the attack, the link leads to a page on a religious Web site that was most likely compromised. The page contains hidden iframes loading the Neosploit exploit pack from a third-party server. The toolkit performs several checks to determine the version of popular applications installed on the visitor’s computer and serves the appropriate exploit. If successful, the exploit will silently download and execute a generic Trojan downloader which will install a variant of the ZeuS information stealing Trojan. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Fake-Miles-More-Emails-Lead-to-Zbot-Drive-By-Download-177840.shtml
Communications Sector
Nothing to report
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