Monday, May 16, 2011

Complete DHS Daily Report for May 16, 2011

Daily Report

Top Stories

• ABC News reports Missouri police captured a gunman who allegedly engaged in a shootout with law enforcement officers and spurred a nearly 5-hour manhunt after entering a U.S. Army post and nearby university campus. (See item 37)

37. May 12, ABC News and Associated Press – (Missouri) Missouri gunman captured after entering Army post, university campus. Missouri police captured a gunman who allegedly engaged in a shootout with law enforcement officers and spurred a nearly 5-hour manhunt after entering a Missouri U.S. Army post and nearby university campus early May 12. The suspect is in custody and suffering from a wound to his arm, police said. The 31-year-old man faces four felony charges of assault on law enforcement and will be held on $1 million dollar bond, the Rolla police chief said. The suspect allegedly attempted to enter Fort Leonard Wood near Waynesville, Missouri, around 8:30 a.m., a spokesperson for the post said. When security asked the man to stop at the gate and submit to further inspection, authorities said he refused to do so. After exiting, the suspect continued to evade authorities, driving down I-44 and allegedly firing on police with an AK-47 assault rifle. Police set up spike strips on the highway, prompting the suspect to exit the highway and enter the college town of Rolla, the home of the Missouri University of Science and Technology. “The suspect then began shooting at the Rolla Police Officers and members of the County Sheriff’s department as they pursued him,” the police chief said at an earlier press conference. Police said the suspect then jumped out of the car and stole a 2003 Ford Taurus. A scant blood trail was left from where the man jumped out of the car and into the grey Taurus, police said. At least one car was riddled with bullet holes, and police later found drugs that appeared to be crystal meth in the car the suspect was initially driving. University officials said the man fired shots near the campus, but not on the campus, and the campus remained on lockdown throughout the morning. Source: http://abcnews.go.com/US/missouri-gunman-captured-entering-fort-leonard-wood-missouri/story?id=13589605

• According to msnbc.com, officials told hundreds of people to evacuate Vicksburg, Mississippi, ahead of an expected decision to flood their farms and town to protect major Louisiana cities, and shipping of gasoline and other products. (See item 55)

55. May 12, msnbc.com; Associated Press; Reuters – (Louisiana) ‘Sacrificial’ towns prepare for deliberate flooding. About 400 more people in Vicksburg, Mississippi, were told to evacuate the town May 12, while downriver thousands hurriedly packed ahead of an expected decision to flood their farms and towns in order to protect Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. County officials ordered evacuations May 12 in Vicksburg after determining that U.S. 61 would soon be cut off by rising waters. The downtown area of the town sits on a protected bluff, but dozens of homes at river level have already been swamped by the Mississippi or the Yazoo River, a tributary. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also placed high-density plastic sheeting along a 4-mile section of the Yazoo Backwater levee to keep it from eroding if the levee is overrun, said a spokesman for the agency responsible for flood control. The Yazoo Backwater levee is designed to hold the Yazoo River and the Mississippi from flowing into the south Delta. If there were no levee, up to 2 million acres of land would be flooded, he said. The Corps could open the Morganza floodway north of Baton Rouge as early as the weekend of May 14, a move that would relieve pressure on the city’s levee system. Opening the spillway gates for the first time in 38 years will unleash the Mississippi on a ride south to the Gulf of Mexico through the Atchafalaya River and divert floodwater from the river into the basin’s swamplands, backwater lakes, and bayous. Several thousand homes would be at risk of flooding. Even if engineers decide against opening the spillway, no one seems to doubt a major flood is bound for Butte LaRose, Krotz Springs, the oil-and-seafood hub of Morgan City, and other swampland communities in the Atchafalaya Basin. The Morganza and the nearby Old River Control Structure were built in the 1950s to keep the Mississippi on its current course through New Orleans, one of the world’s busiest ports. If the river rises much higher at New Orleans, the U.S. Coast Guard said May 12 it would consider restrictions on shipping, including potentially closing the channel to the largest, heaviest ships. A shutdown would temporarily cut off gasoline supplies shipped from several major U.S. refineries upriver. Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43004322/ns/weather/t/tiger-dams-join-sandbags-mississippi-fight/

Details

Banking and Finance Sector

15. May 13, KCBY 11 Coos Bay – (Oregon) Former banker admits stealing from customers. A former assistant branch manager at Wells Fargo Bank in Coos Bay, Oregon, pleaded guilty May 12 to bank fraud and admitted stealing over a half million dollars from customers. The 38-year-old woman is scheduled to be sentenced July 14 by a U. S. district judge. She is in federal custody pending sentencing. In August 2010, customers at the Wells Fargo Bank on North Broadway in Coos Bay reported funds missing from their accounts. An internal investigation determined the suspect was responsible for the theft of funds. Meanwhile, she vanished and lived as a fugitive under false pretense by pretending to be a victim of domestic abuse, prosecutors said. A reward was offered for her arrest in November 2010. She turned herself in to the FBI in December. The woman admitted that between January 17, 2008 and August 30, 2010, she stole $626,553.17 from multiple customer accounts. In pleading guilty, she also consented to the forfeiture of personal property seized during the execution of a search warrant on her residence in October 2010. The maximum statutory penalty for bank fraud is a 30-year term of imprisonment, and a $1million fine, followed by a 5-year term of supervised release. Source: http://www.kpic.com/news/local/121738574.html

16. May 13, Reuters – (International) China bank bomb wounds 49, suspect caught. A petrol bomb set off May 13 by a disgruntled former employee at a rural bank in a Tibetan region of northwestern China’s Gansu province wounded 49 people, Xinhua news agency and the local government said. Nineteen people were seriously hurt in the blast at the Tianzhu County Rural Credit United Cooperative, in the city of Wuwei in Tianzhu county, caused by what a witness called a “gasoline bomb”, Xinhua said in an English-language report. The Tianzhu government said a Han Chinese man fired from his job at the bank last month after being accused of embezzlement had thrown a bottle filled with petrol into a meeting room, setting it ablaze. The man fled the scene, but police caught him hours later, a second Xinhua report said. Bomb attacks are rare in China, although disgruntled residents have set off explosions in buses and buildings in the past to complain about local grievances. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/china-bank-blast-idUSL3E7GD0BQ20110513

17. May 11, Charleston Post and Courier – (South Carolina) Dangerfield indicted for bank fraud. Federal prosecutors have indicted five people in an auto dealer bank-fraud case in South Carolina, including the man behind a popular Suzuki empire that went bust 2 years ago, the U.S. attorney’s office said May 11. The indictment announced by the U.S. attorney alleges that between July 2004 and February 2009, the man and his co-defendants conspired to defraud Fifth Third Bank by making misrepresentations to auditors about the status of vehicles being sold. Several dealerships were involved including those in Moncks Corner, Myrtle Beach, and Easley. As a result, the indictment alleges, the group obtained approximately $3.8 million from Fifth Third. Source: http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/may/11/dangerfield-indicted-bank-fraud/

Information Technology

44. May 13, The Register – (International) One thumb up for Facebook security improvements. Security changes designed to curtail the spam and scams that have become endemic on Facebook over recent months have received a cautious welcome from security watchers. Facebook has introduced a series of new features including: a known-bad-site blacklist (via a partnership with crowd-sourced blacklist outfit Web of Trust); protection against clickjacking; and limited support for two-factor authentication. As an opt-in service, Facebook will send users an SMS every time someone logs in from “a new or unrecognized device.” Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/13/facebook_security_criticism/

45. May 13, Computerworld – (International) Windows 7’s malware infection rate climbs, XP’s falls. Data released May 12 by Microsoft showed that Windows 7’s malware infection rate climbed by more than 30 percent during the second half of 2010, even as the infection rate of the 10-year-old Windows XP fell by more than 20 percent. “Infection rates have jumped [for Windows 7],” admitted the principal group program manager with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. “We attribute that to the increased presence of malicious software attacks out there.” For the second half of 2010, 32-bit Windows 7 machines were infected at an average rate of more than 4 PCs per 1,000, a 33 percent increase over the approximately 3-per-1,000 infection rate during the first half of the year. PCs running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 fared slightly better, with an infection rate of 2.5 per 1,000 during all of 2010. The infection rates were tabulated from scans conducted by the Malicious Software Removal Tool, a free utility updated monthly and pushed to Windows users via Microsoft’s update services. The tool detects and deletes selected malware, including fake antivirus programs, worms, viruses, and bot trojans. Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216654/Windows_7_s_malware_infection_rate_climbs_XP_s_falls

46. May 13, Softpedia – (International) Chrome updated with security patches and new Flash. Google has updated Chrome to version 11.0.696.68 in order to address two high-risk vulnerabilities and include the new Flash Player 10.3 plug-in. Both vulnerabilities were discovered internally by members of the Google Chrome Security Team. One of the flaws, CVE-2011-1799, consists of bad casts in code linking Chromium and WebKit, while the other, CVE-2011-1800, concerns integer overflows in SVG filters. Adobe Flash Player 10.3 addresses a number of 11 vulnerabilities, 10 of which are rated as critical and allow for arbitrary code execution. Another important change is that it integrates with browser privacy controls and allows Chrome users to clear Flash local storage objects (Flash cookies) directly from the browser’s interface. Under normal circumstances, updating Flash Player is very important because outdated plug-ins are regularly targeted in Web-based attacks, however, its impact is lower in Chrome. Google’s browser comes bundled with a Flash Player plug-in created in collaboration with Adobe which runs under its native sandbox. This kind of isolation makes it very hard for hackers to execute code on the underlying system if a Flash Player vulnerability is exploited. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chrome-Updated-with-Security-Patches-and-New-Flash-200362.shtml

Communications Sector

47. May 12, Broadcast Engineering – (National) FCC gets aggressive on broadcast tower safety. The Federal Communications Commission ( FCC) Enforcement Bureau is getting aggressive in fining broadcasters for safety issues involving their antenna towers. In several recent fines, the commission is taking the position that any violation — if it occurs on more than one day — is willful and a repeated violation. The Broadcast Law Blog cited three recent FCC cases that it said demonstrates how seriously the FCC views tower site safety issues. A broadcast station was fined a total of $14,000 when it was found the fence surrounding its transmitter was falling down and it did not enclose areas of high RF radiation. The station also had a main studio that was unattended on 2 successive days, and had no one answering the phone on those days when the FCC tried to call. In another case, the FCC fined a station $10,000 for areas of high RF radiation that were not fenced or marked by signs when the FCC conducted its inspection and $4000 for operating overpower. In another case, the FCC fined a station because the flashing beacon on the top of a tower was out on 2 successive days, even though the required steady-lit obstruction lights on the side of the tower were operational. While the licensee notified the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the outage 3 days later (with no noted prompting from the FCC), and had the situation corrected 2 days after notifying the FAA, the FCC determined the violation was repeated and willful, leading to a $10,000 fine. Source: http://broadcastengineering.com/news/fcc_gets_agressive_on_broadcast_tower_safety_051211/