Monday, October 29, 2007
Daily Report
- · KIRO TV Channel 7 in Seattle, Washington reports that handguns stored in luggage have been disappearing from major airports, which means that dangerous weapons might be loose in secure areas in direct proximity to passenger jets. A number of declared guns have gone missing before the bags arrive at their destinations. Security officials worry that those weapons might end up in the hands of terrorists. (See items 13)
- · Government Executive reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has yet to develop a comprehensive plan for how companies would recover from cyberattacks that disrupt the Internet, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) auditor. Although the DHS developed a plan in 2006 for how businesses and the government could recover from such cyberattacks, there is no public-private plan for recovery. (See item 29 )
Source:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=security&articleId=9044239&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top
software scheme. Four people have been sentenced to prison and fined tens of millions of dollars for buying discounted Microsoft Corp. software and then illegally reselling it at a profit. Two of the convicted, husband-and-wife owners of Samtech Research, were sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison and ordered to pay more than $25 million in fines to Microsoft for their role in a software reselling scheme they ran between 1997 and 2001. Together with two associates they purchased more than $29 million worth of software at Microsoft’s academic-discount rates and then resold it to nonacademic entities, making more than $5 million in profits. The couple had already been kicked out of Microsoft’s Authorized Education Reseller (AER) program, but they “formed new corporations ... to disguise their identity from Microsoft and re-enter the AER program,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement yesterday. They laundered their profits by purchasing real estate in their son’s name and by wiring more than $300,000 to Pakistan, the DOJ said. The couple’s associates were also sentenced in connection with the case. The scam was exposed during a two-year undercover investigation called Operation Cyberstorm, which was conducted by the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service.
Source
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=security&articleId=9044219&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_top
Source: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13797
comprehensive plan for how companies would recover from cyberattacks disrupting the
Internet, in part because the department has not been able to find and keep highly trained cybersecurity experts, according to a top information technology auditor at the
Government Accountability Office (GAO). In 2006, DHS developed a plan for how
businesses and the government could recover from a cyberattack that disrupted the
Internet. In that plan, DHS laid out the response that would be coordinated by the National Communications System, which would be responsible for the hardware and security infrastructure. The National Cyber Security Division would be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the software applications and information under attack. Still, “there is no public-private plan for recovery and there is no date by which such a plan must exist,” testified GAO’s director of information technology at a Tuesday hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives. Companies and individuals worldwide lose about $14 billion through the Internet because of malicious code attacks, but the Internet has yet to suffer a catastrophic failure, he said.
Source: http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=38377&dcn=todaysnews