Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Complete DHS Daily Report for February 1, 2012
Daily Report
Top Stories
• A new report found that most ships involved in reported cases of sanctions-busting or illicit transfers of arms, drugs, and equipment that could be used in the development of missiles and weapons of mass destruction are owned by companies based in the world’s richest countries, including the United States. – London Guardian (See item 17)
17. January 29, London Guardian – (International) Sea trafficking report reveals how ships move guns and drugs. Most ships involved in reported cases of sanctions-busting or illicit transfers of arms, drugs, and equipment that could be used in the development of missiles and weapons of mass destruction are owned by companies based in the world’s richest countries, according to the first comprehensive study of maritime trafficking. The ships are primarily commercial lines based in Germany, Greece, and the United States, according to the report, released January 30 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “This doesn’t mean the ship owners, or even the captains, know what they are carrying. But it is relatively easy for traffickers to hide arms and drugs in among legitimate cargoes,” said the report’s co-author. The report shows the methods adopted by arms trafficking networks in response to United Nations embargoes on Iran and North Korea were pioneered by drug traffickers. They included hiding goods in sealed shipping containers that claim to carry legitimate items; sending the goods on foreign-owned ships engaged in legitimate trade; and using circuitous routes to make the shipments harder for surveillance operations to track. The report shows that in cases where the ship owners, operators, and captains appear to have been directly involved in the trafficking attempt, the ships tended to be older and to be sailing under “flags of convenience.” They regularly performed badly in safety and pollution inspections when they entered ports. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/30/sea-trafficking-report-guns-drugs
• Tanker trucks loaded with water have become the lifeline for a Texas village that came close to becoming the state’s first community to run out of drinking water during a historic drought. – Associated Press (See item 23)
23. January 31, Associated Press – (Texas) Texas town relying on tanker trucks for water after wells nearly run dry amid drought. Tanker trucks loaded with water have become the lifeline for a Texas lakefront village that came close to becoming the state’s first community to run out of drinking water during a historic drought. Spicewood received its first 8,000-gallon water delivery January 30, after it became clear wells could no longer produce enough water to meet the needs of the community’s 1,100 residents and elementary school, a spokeswoman of the Lower Colorado River Authority said. The manager of water operations for the authority said it plans to truck water into the central Texas town for several more weeks while exploring alternatives, including drilling a new well or piping water from Lake Travis. But the agency does not want to rush into any project, and prefers for now to pay $200 per truckload of water while ensuring the tens of thousands of dollars it will cost to find a permanent solution are well spent. Several towns and villages in Texas have come close to running out of water during the driest year in state history, but until now none has had to truck in water. The Lower Colorado River Authority realized the week of January 23 how dire the situation was, and informed a commissioner in Burnet County January 30. By the next day, the well had dropped an additional 1.3 feet overnight. The severest forms of water restrictions have been put in place, and the authority said there would be no new hookups to the town’s water supply. Trucks, including at least one 6,000 gallon tanker, will make about four or five deliveries a day, officials said. Source: http://www.newser.com/article/d9sjtidg1/texas-town-relying-on-tanker-trucks-for-water-after-wells-nearly-run-dry-amid-drought.html
Details
Banking and Finance Sector
11. January 31, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette – (Indiana; International) Ex-Symmetry execs accused in books fraud. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) January 30 charged four former executives at a British subsidiary of Warsaw, Indiana’s Symmetry Medical with accounting fraud and ordered current executives to pay back profits based on earnings from before the alleged fraud was discovered. The complaint filed in a South Bend, Indiana district court charged four people with years of fraud. The current Symmetry president of business development also agreed to reimburse Symmetry for bonuses, incentive pay, and stock profits he garnered during the time of the fraud. That agreement, subject to approval, will result in $450,000 in reimbursements, the SEC said. Symmetry’s chief financial officer agreed to pay a $25,000 penalty and reimburse $185,000 for failing to provide an internal audit status report. According to court documents, the scheme at Thornton Precision Components began in 1999, 4 years before it was acquired by Symmetry. Those named generated premature invoices for products not complete, recorded fictional sales, created fake documentation, and manipulated inventories. In 2003, Thornton Precision passed the phony information on to Symmetry. When Symmetry restated its earnings from that period, the numbers dropped from 39 percent to 421 percent. In the fiscal year 2005, Symmetry initially reported $31.8 million in income, but in reality lost $9.9 million, court documents said. “The fraud caused Symmetry’s share price to be fraudulently inflated by as much as 20.4 percent, with a corresponding loss to Symmetry and its investors … of as much as $120 million in market capitalization,” SEC attorneys allege. Two auditors at the British branch of the accounting firm Ernst & Young were found to have engaged in improper professional conduct by failing to properly audit Thornton Precision. The two have been barred from practicing before the SEC for at least 2 years. Source: http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20120131/LOCAL03/301319970/1002/LOCAL
12. January 31, Associated Press – (California; Missouri) Calif. man pleads guilty in $8.5M mortgage fraud. A California man pleaded guilty January 30 in federal court in Kansas City, Missouri, to his role in a mortgage scheme that defrauded a western Missouri bank of more than $8.5 million. He admitted defrauding American Sterling Bank in Sugar Creek in a scheme that ran from October 2006 to January 2007, about 18 months before the suburban Kansas City bank was closed. Prosecutors said the defendant submitted fraudulent loan applications for borrowers on behalf of a California mortgage broker. American Sterling approved nearly $8.6 million in loans for 19 properties in California. He could be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison without parole and fined up to $1 million. Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/01/31/state/n020134S43.DTL
13. January 31, Cleveland Plain Dealer – (Ohio; International) ‘Koljo the American’ pleads guilty in federal court for his role in St. Paul Croatian Credit Union collapse. A man described in Macedonian newspapers as an organized crime figure pleaded guilty to 18 counts of bribery, bank fraud, and money laundering January 30 in a federal court in Cleveland for his role in the collapse of the St. Paul Croatian Federal Credit Union in Eastlake, Ohio, a U.S. Department of Justice spokesman said. The spokesman said that between 2003 and 2009, the man, working with the credit union’s chief operating officer (COO), fraudulently obtained loans of $5.6 million that were never repaid. Federal law enforcement officials called it one of the largest credit union failures in American history. It cost the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund $170 million. Of the $5.6 million the man obtained for himself and family members, the spokesman said, $2 million was sent to bank accounts in the Balkan Republic of Macedonia. The spokesman said officials recovered about $850,000 of the $2 million. Source: http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2012/01/koljo_the_american_pleads_guil.html
14. January 30, Atlanta Journal-Constitution – (Georgia; Hawaii) DeKalb woman admits scamming U.S. Senator in credit card fraud. A DeKalb County, Georgia woman pleaded guilty January 30 to her part in a credit card fraud ring that victimized, among other people, a U.S. Senator. The defendant was indicted in May on identity fraud and financial transaction card fraud for helping two other people purchase $12,000 in Wal-Mart gift cards and other merchandise with bogus credit cards encoded with real account numbers on the magnetic strip. The woman was an accomplice in a credit card skimming scam for which authorities are seeking the mastermind, court officials said. The mastermind was arrested in March 2010 and released on bond with the promise he would cooperate with the Secret Service. But he instead fled and is being sought by authorities. The mastermind’s involvement stretched farther than the store where the woman worked. First Hawaiian Bank officials told police the U.S. Senator’s Mastercard account was used at other Wal-Mart locations. Also, when police searched the man’s hotel room before he was arrested, they found documentation showing he had just deposited two checks worth more than $100,000 into a bank account, the district attorney said in court. The checks were counterfeited from a New York-based non-profit, she said. Also in the hotel room were a computer, a re-encoding machine for making counterfeit credit cards, Wal-Mart and American Express gift cards, and stolen debit cards. Source: http://www.ajc.com/news/dekalb/dekalb-woman-admits-scamming-1323949.html
For another story, see item 42 below in the Information Technology Sector
Information Technology
39. January 31, SC Magazine UK – (International) Symantec declares pcAnywhere safe to use. Symantec announced its pcAnywhere software is now safe to use, with free upgrades offered to users, SC Magazine UK reported January 31. According to Reuters, the company determined the current version of pcAnywhere is safe, provided it has been updated with a security patch released January 23. A Symantec spokesman said it is offering free upgrades to pcAnywhere 12.5 to all customers, even those using old editions. He also said that while Symantec is advising all users to upgrade, they can safely continue using versions 12.0 and 12.1 if they download a second software patch released January 27. Symantec advised users the week of January 23 to disable pcAnywhere as they were at increased risk of being hacked after the blueprints to the software were stolen. However, according to the chief security officer at Rapid7, more than 140,000 computers appear to remain configured to pcAnywhere to allow direct connections from the Internet, especially point-of-sale machines, putting them at risk. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/symantec-declares-pcanywhere-safe-to-use/article/225425/
40. January 31, The Register – (International) Virus-slingers abuse WordPress vulns, dose punters with exploit. Malware-spreaders are hacking into vulnerable WordPress-powered sites to drive traffic towards pages loaded with exploits, The Register reported January 31. Hundreds of Web sites based on WordPress 3.2.1 have been compromised so that surfers directed to the Wordpress-built sites via e-mail links are exposed to the Phoenix exploit kit, M86 Security warned. To lure users to compromised pages, the attacker has spammed out thousands of malicious e-mails querying an unfamiliar bill and asking recipients to click on a link. The link points to a page on compromised WordPress sites (the sites appear legitimate to spam filters) that includes a hidden iFrame, which loads the Phoenix exploit kit from a Russian-hosted server. Arriving at the page puts surfers in the firing line of a page that attempts exploit multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Adobe PDF, Flash, and Oracle Java. The attack is ultimately designed to distribute a information-harvesting Trojan, dubbed Cridex-B. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/31/wordpress_vuln_phoenix/
41. January 31, Softpedia – (International) Facebook Valentine’s Day Theme Leads to Trojan. Trend Micro researchers came across a Valentine’s Day-themed Facebook scam that attempts to dupe victims into downloading a malicious Trojan that later places itself in the browser with the purpose of helping crooks make money, Softpedia reported January 31. Facebook customers who fall for the phony advertisement and click it are taken to a Web site that displays a large Install button. Once clicked, the page prompts the user to download a file called FacebookChrome.crx, identified by the security firm as Troj.Fookbace.A. Upon execution, the Trojan executes a script that is capable of displaying ads from other sites, as well as installing itself on the browser as an extension named Facebook Improvement. After it is successfully installed, the malicious extension monitors Web activities, redirects sessions to survey pages that request sensitive data, performs like-jacking attacks, and posts ill-intended messages onbehalf of the victim. Experts believe these attacks are specially designed to target Chrome users, but note they also work with Mozilla Firefox. Facebook members that utilize Internet Explorer are directly taken to the survey site because the extension does not work that browser. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Facebook-Valentine-s-Day-Theme-Leads-to-Trojan-249729.shtml
42. January 30, Softpedia – (International) Cidrex trojan breaks CAPTCHA to create Yahoo! email account. Security experts found a component of the ZeuS-like Cidrex trojan was able to break the security tests to create e-mail accounts, Softpedia reported January 30. Websense researchers came across a variant of Cidrex, a banking trojan, that not only infects computers with the purpose of stealing sensitive data from their owners, but it also manages to create Yahoo! e-mail accounts to spam others. This certain version of the malware spreads via e-mails containing a shortened link that points to the Blackhole exploit kit. If the exploit is successful, the trojan is downloaded to the infected machine. Normally, if CAPTCHAs were strong, automated tools would have a hard time creating accounts, but experts showed that with just six attempts, this malevolent element breaks the security test and creates a Yahoo e-mail account without much difficulty. This is done by harvesting the image that represents the CAPTCHA and sending it with an HTTP POST request to a CAPTCHA-breaking server that outputs a response in JSON format. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Cidrex-Trojan-Breaks-CAPTCHA-to-Create-Yahoo-Email-Account-249437.shtml
43. January 30, The H – (International) Samba update closes DoS hole. The developers ofSamba released a security update to the Samba Windows interoperability suite for Unix, H Security reported January 30. Version 3.6.3 of Samba was published only 4 days after releasing the new stable version, Samba 3.6.2. The security update addressed a memory leak that consumes a small amount of memory when the smbd daemon is handling connection requests. If an attacker made repeated connection requests, this flaw could be exploited to cause a denial of service. Source: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Samba-update-closes-DoS-hole-1424516.html
For another story, see item 45 below in the Communications Sector.
Communications Sector
44. January 31, Lynchburg News & Advance – (Virginia) Service outage strikes nTelos Wireless customers. A service outage lasting about three hours affected nTelos Wireless customers in western parts of Virginia January 31. The outage started at 7:04 a.m. due to an equipment failure, the director of public relations for the Waynesboro-based cell phone company said. The equipment failure took out three circuits that transport all calls or text messages. The outage affected customers from Lynchburg and Charlottesville to the western part of the state. All calls routed back to the Waynesboro area, where the equipment failure occurred. The equipment was repaired by 10 a.m. and the public relations director said customers should have restored service. There were no numbers on how many customers were affected. Source: http://www2.newsadvance.com/business/2012/jan/31/2/service-outage-strikes-ntelos-wireless-customers-ar-1652727/
45. January 30, KYTV 3 Springfield – (Missouri) Internet outage at Mediacom affects 30,000+ customers in southern MO. Mediacom said a problem connecting to another company caused an Internet service outage for 30,000 - 60,000 Mediacom customers January 30, including KY3 and KSPR. The outage started about 1:30 p.m. January 30 and was still ongoing 4 hours later. Mediacom said it did not know how long the problem would last. The outage affected customers in Springfield and other areas of southern Missouri. Source: http://www.kspr.com/news/ky3-internet-outage-at-mediacom-affects-30000-customers-in-southern-mo-20120130,0,575163.story
For more stories, see items 41 and 42 above in the Information Technology Sector
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