Daily Report Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Daily Highlights

The Associated Press reports a United Airlines passenger faces federal charges for allegedly making statements about a hijacking, trying to open a cabin door, and fighting with flight attendants while aboard a flight from Boston to San Francisco. (See item 11)
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The Army Corps of Engineers began lowering the water level on Lake Cumberland behind the Wolf Creek Dam, on Monday, January 22, fearing a dam break that could cause catastrophic flooding in Kentucky and Tennessee. (See item 29)

Information Technology and Telecommunications Sector

26. January 23, IDG News Service — Symantec: Storm Trojan worst outbreak since 2005. Malicious software that was sent out in millions of spam messages over the weekend has now infected about 300,000 computers, making it the worst malware outbreak since 2005, Symantec said Monday, January 22. The so called "Storm Worm" e.mail messages first started appearing last Wednesday, advertising attached news reports on topics like "230 Dead as storm batters Europe," or "U.S. Secretary of Sate Condoleeza Rice has kicked German Chancellor." "Over the weekend it really kicked into high gear," said Patrick Martin, senior product manager with Symantec Security Response. The last time malicious software spread this quickly was in May 2005, when the Sober.O mass.mailing worm affected a similar number of systems, Martin said. The latest versions of the worm include similarly provocative news headlines and malicious attachments, but the criminals have added a twist over the past few days: the text of the e.mail messages now contains glowing reviews of penny stocks. In addition, some of the recent versions of these Trojan e.mails have contained subject lines such as "A Bouguet of Love," "A Day in Bed Coupon," or "A Monkey Rose for You." security vendor F.Secure Corp. warned.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/23/HNstormtrojanworst _1.html

27. January 23, IDG News Service — Latest McAfee upgrade jams up Lotus Notes. The latest upgrade to McAfee's VirusScan Enterprise security software is causing hiccups for some versions of IBM's Lotus Notes, the companies warned. The problem affects users who have upgraded to VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i and are using the R6 or R7 version of Lotus Notes, McAfee said. While working in Lotus Notes e.mail for a period of time, typically an hour or two, the program will display the following error message when users try to open or delete e.mail: "You are not authorized to perform that operation." Users can close the dialog box but then can't do anything else in Notes.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/23/HNmcafeeupgradejam snotes_1.html

28. January 23, IDG News Service — China Internet market grows to 137 million users. China added another 14 million Internet users in 2006, retaining its status as the world's second largest Internet market with 137 million total users, the China Internet Network Information Center announced Tuesday, January 23. Of those, 90.7 million access the Internet using a broadband connection, a 15 percent jump over 2005, although total broadband use held steady at two.thirds of the Internet population. Also, 17 million users now access the Internet primarily via a wireless device.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/23/HNchinainternetgro ws_1.html