New rules may require banks verify ID. Under new regulations proposed on 17 July by the Treasury Department, banks, credit unions and other financial institutions will be required to verify the identities of all people wanting to open new accounts. People opening new accounts will also be checked against a government-issued list of known or suspected terrorists. The rules are being issued a week after FBI officials told Congress that the 11 September hijackers were able to open bank accounts with fake Social Security numbers that were never checked. Many large financial institutions already have policies in place to check identities. Under the proposed regulations, financial institutions, including banks, savings associations, credit unions, securities brokers and dealers and mutual funds, can decide what type of identifying information to require. (Associated Press, 17 Jul) Congress readies anti-terror package. House and Senate negotiators met on 18 July to complete a $28.9 billion package for increasing anti-terrorism programs. The plan would rush money to the Pentagon, the FBI and other domestic security agencies, and to New York to help it heal in the wake of 11 September. The funds are for the rest of the federal fiscal year that runs through 30 Sept. The $28.9 billion includes $100 million added to deal with wildfire and floods. The House took up two more spending bills on 18 July, one being an $18.5 billion bill for the Treasury Department that boost anti-terrorism and drug-fighting efforts in the US Customs Service. (Associated Press, 18 Jul) Israel blocks Palestinian ISP. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops took over the offices of Palnet, the leading Palestinian Internet service provider, shutting down the firm's operations. The move reduced Internet access to a trickle in the West Bank and Gaza. The strike is part of a larger, intermittent effort by the Israeli military to hobble the Palestinians' communications and media infrastructure. The IDF has recently been talking up the ways in which terrorists are using the Internet to plot and plan. In June, the IDF posted to its Web site a discussion allegedly taken from the Hamas site in which members debate whether arsenic, rat poison or cyanide would be most effective in killing Americans. (Wired News, 18 Jul) WWU Comment: The closing of "Palnet" could affect the threat of anti-US hacking from Palestinian hackers or sympathizers. The cessation of Palnet services may lessen the threat posed to US systems by hackers that use Palnet; however, this action could prompt sympathetic hacking attempts to protest perceived pro-Israeli attitudes on the part of the US. Yahoo! admits tinkering with personal e-mails to foil hackers. Yahoo! has admitted using an automated filtering system that alters text in personal e-mails. The system targets a handful of words that could be used by hackers developing malicious code. One of the outlawed words is 'Medieval.' 'Medieval' is unlikely to make it past the covert filtering system because the '-eval' part mirrors a command to evaluate code. Instead references to the Middle Ages become 'Medireview'. Security experts say scanning for malicious code is not new, but that Yahoo! seems to be going further than other firms by targeting specific words. (ANANOVA.com, 18 Jul). _______________________________________________ Infragard_unsecured mailing list Infragard_unsecured@private http://listserv.leo.gov/mailman/listinfo/infragard_unsecured
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jul 19 2002 - 11:49:57 PDT