-----Original Message----- From: NIPC Watch [mailto:nipc.watch@private] Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 7:02 AM To: Information Technology Subject: [Information_technology] Daily News 4/3/03 April 02, Associated Press Thieves take computers containing details on radioactive material. Eight state-owned computers containing details on all of the New Mexico companies that use radioactive material have been stolen, officials said Tuesday. The names, addresses and phone numbers of more than 210 businesses are contained in the stolen computers, along with what radioactive materials each is licensed to have, said Bill Floyd, manager of the state Environment Department's Radiation Control Bureau. Thieves took the eight computer towers from the bureau's office in Santa Fe either Thursday night or early Friday. While the files are legally accessible to the public, anyone seeking them would need to do so under the Freedom of Information Act, Floyd said. He said he believed the culprits were seeking the machines themselves -- not the data in them. Source: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Southwest/04/02/radiation.files.ap/index.html April 01, The Oregonian Al Qaeda supporters hack into student's Web site. The Web site of a Portland State University graduate student was targeted in a wave of Internet hackings supporting al Qaeda. Files planted in Conrado Salas Cano's personal Web site housed threats against the United States, tributes to the September 11 attacks and purported messages from Osama bin Laden. The FBI reportedly launched an investigation, and some cyberterrorism followers said it resembled attacks by al Neda, the online propaganda unit of al Qaeda. Josh Devon, an analyst at the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute, said some of the pages contain pictures of guns and bomb-making manuals in Arabic. Specific plans of future attacks aren't on the site, although Devon said it's possible they use code words to communicate attacks. Since losing their domain name last summer, Devon said al Neda has been hacking into various sites around the globe to spread its message. Once the sites are discovered and shut down, a new al Neda site pops up within 48 hours. News of the Web sites, he said, spreads by word of mouth and in Arabic newspapers. Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base /business/1049201902166680.xml April 01, Reuters Website hoax fans virus panic. A teenager's website hoax about a killer virus that is sweeping Hong Kong sparked panicked food buying and hit financial markets on Tuesday, forcing the government to deny it would isolate the entire territory. "We have no plan to declare Hong Kong an infected area," Director of Health Margaret Chan told reporters. "We have adequate supplies to provide (for) the needs of Hong Kong citizens, and there is no need for any panic run on food." In Hong Kong, 685 people are infected by severe acute respiratory syndrome, also known as SARS, and 16 have died from the virus. The fake website scare fueled dismay in the territory adjoining China's Guangdong province, where the virus is believed to have originated four months ago. The hoaxer copied the format of the public Internet portal of the Mingpao, one of Hong Kong's leading newspapers, and posted a message saying the government would declare the city of seven million "an infected place." Source: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,58311,00.html March 31, salon.com Iraq goes offline. U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles aimed at destroying Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine reportedly destroyed several satellite dishes and an Internet server housed at Iraq's Ministry of Information building Saturday. Local phone service in the city was also reportedly disrupted by separate missile strikes on two telecommunications switching centers. Yet Babil Online, the home page of an Iraqi newspaper run by Saddam Hussein's son Uday, was still reachable following the bombing. Babil Online may have escaped the attacks because of its physical location -- the site appears to be hosted on a server not in Baghdad but in Beirut, Lebanon. Some observers have speculated that the United States left Iraq's Internet infrastructure untouched for the first week of the war in order to maintain communications with potential defectors in the high ranks of Iraq's government and military personnel. But Peter W. Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, said he doubted that preserving Iraq's Internet capabilities was high on the priority lists of U.S. military planners. "Internet access is still limited mostly to elites in the country. The U.S. is mostly concerned about protecting things like water and electricity and bridges," said Singer. He said the mission of Iraq's Information Ministry has been not only to fire up nationalism but also to manipulate world opinion and to raise international protests against the war. Source: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/31/iraq_offline/index.html February 28, General Accounting Office Critical Infrastructure Protection: Challenges for Selected Agencies and Industry Sectors. The General Accounting Office has released report GAO-03-233 titled "Critical Infrastructure Protection: Challenges for Selected Agencies and Industry Sectors." With computer interconnectivity comes a threat: both physical and cyber assets are potentially vulnerable to computer-based attack. In response, Presidential Decision Directive 63 (PDD 63, May 1998) called for a range of actions to improve the nation's ability to detect and respond to serious infrastructure attacks. GAO examined four specific agencies--the Departments of Health and Human Services, Energy, and Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency--and found that the agencies have made progress in implementing several PDD 63 requirements. However, none of the agencies has fully implemented all requirements. GAO also examined private-sector groups known as Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) for five specific industry sectors--information technology, telecommunications, energy, electricity, and water supply. ISACs serve as clearinghouses for their sectors to share information. For other suggested activities, such as establishing baseline statistics on computer security incidents, progress is mixed. Both the agencies and the ISACs identified challenges and obstacles to undertaking CIP activities. Agency-identified challenges included coordinating security efforts for critical assets with the General Services Administration, which may often be responsible for protecting agency facilities that house critical assets. The ISACs identified obstacles to information sharing, both between the sectors and the government and within the sectors. In particular, they noted concerns that information reported to the government could be subject to public release under the Freedom of Information Act. Source: http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-03-233 Internet Security Systems - AlertCon: 1 out of 4 https://gtoc.iss.net/ Last Changed 25 March 2003 Security Focus ThreatCon: 1 out of 4 www.securityfocus.com Last Changed 1 April 2003 Current Virus and Port Attacks Virus: #1 Virus in USA: PE_FUNLOVE.4099 Source: http://wtc.trendmicro.com/wtc/wmap.html, Trend World Micro Virus Tracking Center [Infected Computers, North America, Past 24 hours, #1 in United States] Top 10 Target Ports: 137 (netbios-ns), 80 (www), 1434 (ms-sql-m), 25 (smtp), 113 (ident), 445 (microsoft-ds), 139 (netbios-ssn), 6346 (gnutella-svc), 53 (domain), 1214 (kazaa) Source: http://isc.incidents.org/top10.html; Internet Storm Center _______________________________________________ Information_technology mailing list Information_technology@listserv
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