McAfee Virus Protection at SBC

Authors Note: 

Another virus to hit the Internet in 2001 was the Nimda (which is admin spelled backwards) worm. Nimda spread through the Internet rapidly, becoming the fastest propagating computer virus at that time. In fact, according to TruSecure CTO Peter Tippett, it only took 22 minutes from the moment Nimda hit the Internet to reach the top of the list of reported attacks [source: Anthes].

The Nimda worm's primary targets were Internet servers. While it could infect a home PC, its real purpose was to bring Internet traffic to a crawl. It could travel through the Internet using multiple methods, including e-mail. This helped spread the virus across multiple servers in record time.

The Nimda worm created a backdoor into the victim's operating system. It allowed the person behind the attack to access the same level of functions as whatever account was logged into the machine currently. In other words, if a user with limited privileges activated the worm on a computer, the attacker would also have limited access to the computer's functions. On the other hand, if the victim was the administrator for the machine, the attacker would have full control.

The spread of the Nimda virus caused some network systems to crash as more of the system's resources became fodder for the worm. In effect, the Nimda worm became a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

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Former F.B.I. Agent Sues, Claiming Retaliation Over Misgivings in Anthrax Case

 

By SCOTT SHANEAPRIL 8, 2015
  WASHINGTON — When Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist, took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in 2008, the government declared that he had been responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, which killed five people and set off a nationwide panic, and closed the case.
Now, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Energy Department’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case.
The anthrax letters were mailed to United States senators and news organizations in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, causing a huge and costly disruption in the postal system and the federal government. Members of Congress and Supreme Court justices were forced from their offices while technicians in biohazard suits cleaned up the lethal anthrax powder. Decontamination costs nationwide exceeded $1 billion. At least 17 people were sickened, in addition to the five who died.
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The bureau’s investigation, one of the longest-running and most technically complex inquiries in its history, has long been seen as troubled. Investigators initially lacked the forensic skills to analyze bioterrorist attacks. For several years, agents focused on a former Army scientist and physician, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who was subsequently cleared and given a $4.6 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit. Reviews by the National Academy of Sciences and the Government Accountability Office faulted aspects of the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the case.
Photo

The late Bruce Ivins in 2003, when he was a microbiologist at Fort Detrick, Md.CreditSam Yu/Frederick News Post, via Assocaited Press
Mr. Lambert, who was himself criticized for pursuing Dr. Hatfill for so long, has now offered, in his lawsuit and in an interview, an insider’s view of what hampered the investigation.
“This case was hailed at the time as the most important case in the history of the F.B.I.,” Mr. Lambert said. “But it was difficult for me to get experienced investigators assigned to it.”
He said that the effort was understaffed and plagued by turnover, and that 12 of 20 agents assigned to the case had no prior investigative experience. Senior bureau microbiologists were not made available, and two Ph.D. microbiologists who were put on the case were then removed for an 18-month Arabic language program in Israel. Fear of leaks led top officials to order the extreme compartmentalization of information, with investigators often unable to compare notes and share findings with colleagues, he said.
Mr. Lambert said he outlined the problems in a formal complaint in 2006 to the F.B.I.’s deputy director. Some of his accusations were later included in a report on the anthrax case by the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” infuriating bureau leaders.
The F.B.I., which rarely comments on pending litigation, did not respond to requests for comment on Mr. Lambert’s claims.
Although the lethal letters contained notes expressing jihadist views, investigators came to believe the mailer was an insider in the government’s biodefense labs. They eventually matched the anthrax powder to a flask in Dr. Ivins’s lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland and began intense scrutiny of his life and work.
Photo

The police in Frederick, Md., spoke with a woman they identified as Diane Ivins, the wife of Bruce E. Ivins, 62, at the couple's home in Frederick, Md., in 2008. CreditRob Carr/Associated Press
They discovered electronic records that showed he had spent an unusual amount of time at night in his high-security lab in the periods before the two mailings of the anthrax letters. They found that he had a pattern of sending letters and packages from remote locations under assumed names. They uncovered emails in which he described serious mental problems.
The investigators documented Dr. Ivins’s obsession with a national sorority that had an office near the Princeton, N.J., mailbox where the letters were mailed. They detected what they believed to be coded messages directed at colleagues, hidden in the notes in the letters.
As prosecutors prepared to charge him with the five murders in July 2008, Dr. Ivins, 62, took his own life at home in Frederick, Md. Days later, at a news conference, Jeffrey A. Taylor, then the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

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But Mr. Lambert says the bureau also gathered a large amount of evidence pointing away from Dr. Ivins’s guilt that was never shared with the public or the news media. Had the case come to trial, he said, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.
After retiring from the F.B.I. in 2012, Mr. Lambert joined the Energy Department. But an F.B.I. ethics lawyer ruled that because Mr. Lambert had to work with F.B.I. agents in his new job, he was violating a conflict-of-interest law that forbade former federal employees from contacting previous colleagues for a year after they had left their government jobs.
That ruling led to his dismissal, Mr. Lambert said, and he has not been able to find work despite applying for more than 70 jobs. His lawsuit asserts that several other former F.B.I. agents were able to take identical intelligence jobs with the Energy Department and that he was singled out for mistreatment.

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Anthrax: Molecular epidemiologic investigation of an anthrax outbreak among heroin users, Europe.

Price EP¹, Seymour ML, Sarovich DS, Latham J, Wolken SR, Mason J, Vincent G, Drees KP, Beckstrom-Sternberg SM, Phillippy AM, Koren S, Okinaka RT, Chung WK, Schupp JM, Wagner DM, Vipond R, Foster JT, Bergman NH, Burans J, Pearson T, Brooks T, Keim P.

Author information

Abstract

In December 2009, two unusual cases of anthrax were diagnosed in heroin users in Scotland. A subsequent anthrax outbreak in heroin users emerged throughout Scotland and expanded into England and Germany, sparking concern of nefarious introduction of anthrax spores into the heroin supply. To better understand the outbreak origin, we used established genetic signatures that provided insights about strain origin. Next, we sequenced the whole genome of a representative Bacillus anthracis strain from a heroin user (Ba4599), developed Ba4599-specific single-nucleotide polymorphism assays, and genotyped all available material from other heroin users with anthrax. Of 34 case-patients with B. anthracis-positive PCR results, all shared the Ba4599 single-nucleotide polymorphism genotype. Phylogeographic analysis demonstrated that Ba4599 was closely related to strains from Turkey and not to previously identified isolates from Scotland or Afghanistan, the presumed origin of the heroin. Our results suggest accidental contamination along the drug trafficking route through a cutting agent or animal hides used to smuggle heroin into Europe.

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HEAD of the FBI’s Anthrax Investigation Says the Whole Thing Was a SHAM

The Titan's Feel Good Story
Bennett Public Poison Allegations
HEAD of the FBI’s Anthrax Investigation Says the Whole Thing Was a SHAM
Posted on
April 17, 2015
by
WashingtonsBlog
Agent In Charge of Amerithrax Investigation Blows the Whistle

The FBI head agent in charge of the anthrax investigation – Richard Lambert – has just
filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit
calling the entire FBI investigation bullsh!t:
In the fall of 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, a series of anthrax mailings occurred which killed five Americans and sickened 17 others. Four anthrax-laden envelopes were recovered which were addressed to two news media outlets in New York City (the New York Post and Tom Brokaw at NBC) and two senators in Washington D.C. (Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle). The anthrax letters addressed to New York were mailed on September 18, 2001, just seven days after the 9/11 attacks. The letters addressed to the senators were mailed 21 days later on October 9, 2001. A fifth mailing of anthrax is believed to have been directed to American Media, Inc. (AMI) in Boca Raton, Florida based upon the death of one AMI employee from anthrax poisoning and heavy spore contamination in the building.
Pete Bennett said "POISON" publicly
Less than four days later my The Strack Family (Mormon) (Bennett relatives) were murdered in Springville UT. The COD was poison, methadone and cold medicine (codeine). There are stolen trust documents linked to this murder are with
Alamo 1st Members
linked to my former Employer
Ivory Consulting
, whose clients include GE Capital, Caterpillar and other companies that require leasing solutions. Chris took all my files with the help of the Mormon Church which economically devastated me financially. What I'm saying today will end up in a RICO lawsuit just Mr. Lambert's allegations which mirror my separate story.





My former employer assisted with abducting, then brainwashing my sons into the
Mormon Church.
When I discovered the Suicides, accidents and fires near these people it was clear they are experts thieves. Alice Roberts estate was plundered by David Nearon is one of many examples.
Exonerating Evidence for Ivins
Agent Lambert won’t publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence against Ivins. As the New York Times
reports
:
[Lambert] declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.
But there is already plenty of exculpatory evidence in the public record.
For example
:
Handwriting analysis failed to link the anthrax letters to known writing samples from Ivins
No textile fibers were found in Ivins’ office, residence or vehicles matching fibers found on the scotch tape used to seal the envelopes
No pens were found matching the ink used to address the envelopes
Samples of his hair failed to match hair follicles found inside the Princeton, N.J., mailbox used to mail the letters

No souvenirs of the crime, such as newspaper clippings, were found in his possession as commonly seen in serial murder cases
The FBI could not place Ivins at the crime scene with evidence, such as gas station or other receipts, at the time the letters were mailed in September and October 2001
Lab records show the number of late nights Ivins put in at the lab first spiked in August 2001, weeks before the 9/11 attacks


As noted above, the FBI didn’t want to test the DNA sample found on the anthrax letter to Senator Leahy. In addition, McClatchy
points out
:
After locking in on Ivins in 2007, the bureau stopped searching for a match to a unique genetic bacterial strain scientists had found in the anthrax that was mailed to the Post and to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, although a senior bureau official had characterized it as the hottest clue to date.
Anthrax vaccine expert Meryl Nass. M.D.,
notes
:
The FBI’s alleged motive is bogus. In 2001, Bioport’s anthrax vaccine could not be (legally) relicensed due to potency failures, and its impending demise provided room for Ivins’ newer anthrax vaccines to fill the gap. Ivins had nothing to do with developing Bioport’s vaccine, although in addition to his duties working on newer vaccines, he was charged with assisting Bioport to get through licensure.
***
The FBI report claims the anthrax letters envelopes were sold in Frederick, Md. Later it admits that millions of indistinguishable envelopes were made, with sales in Maryland and Virginia.
***
FBI emphasizes Ivins’ access to a photocopy machine, but fails to mention it was not the machine from which the notes that accompanied the spores were printed.
FBI Fudged the Science
16 government labs
had access to the same strain of anthrax as used in the anthrax letters.
The FBI admitted that up to
400 people
had access to flask of anthrax in Dr. Ivins’ lab. In other words, even if the killer anthrax came from there, 399 other people might have done it.
Moreover, even the FBI’s claim that the killer anthrax came from Ivins’ flask has completely fallen apart. Specifically, both the National Academy of Science and the Government Accountability Office – both extremely prestigious, nonpartisan agencies – found that FBI’s methodology and procedures for purportedly linking the anthrax flask maintained by Dr. Ivins with the anthrax letters was
sloppy, inconclusive and full of holes
. They found that the alleged link
wasn’t very strong
… and that there was
no firm link
. Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences found that the anthrax mailed to Congressmen and the media could have come from a different source altogether than the flask maintained by Ivins.


Additionally, the Ft. Detrick facility – where Ivins worked – only handled liquid anthrax. But the killer anthrax was a hard-to-make dry powder form of anthrax. Ft. Detrick doesn’t produce dry anthrax; but other government labs – for example
Dugway (in Utah)
and
Batelle (in Ohio)
– do.
The anthrax in the letters was also incredibly finely ground; and the FBI’s explanation for how the anthrax became so finely ground
doesn’t even pass the smell test
Further, the killer anthrax in the letters had a
very high-tech anti-static coating
so that the anthrax sample "floated off the glass slide and was lost" when scientists tried to examine it. Specifically, the killer anthrax was
coated with polyglass and each anthrax spore given an electrostatic charge
, so that it would repel other spores and "float". This was very advanced bio-weapons technology to which even Ivins’ bosses said he didn’t have access.
Top anthrax experts like Richard Spertzel
say
that Ivins didn’t do it. Spertzel also
says
that only 4 or 5 people in the entire country knew how to make anthrax of the "quality" used in the letters, that Spertzel was one of them, and it would have taken him a year with a full lab and a staff of helpers to do it. As such, the FBI’s claim that Ivins did it alone working a few nights is ludicrous.
Moreover, the killer anthrax
contained silicon … but the anthrax in Ivins’ flask did not
. The FBI claimed the silicon present in the anthrax letters was absorbed from its surroundings … but Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories
completely debunked
that theory. In other words, silicon was intentionally added to the killer anthrax to make it more potent. Ivins and Ft. Detrick
didn’t have that capability … but other government labs did
.
Similarly, Sandia National Lab found the
presence of iron and tin in the killer anthrax … but NOT
in Ivins’ flask of anthrax.
Sandia also found that there was a
strain of bacteria
in one of the anthrax letters not present in Ivins’ flask. (The bacteria, iron, tin and silicon were all additives which made the anthrax in the letters more deadly.)
The Anthrax Frame Up
Ivins wasn’t the first person framed for the anthrax attacks …
Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually
told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials
(remember what the anthrax letters
looked like
). Government officials also confirm that the white House
tried to link the anthrax to Iraq
as a justification for regime change in that country. And
see this
People don’t remember now, but the "war on terror" and Iraq war were
largely based on the claim that Saddam and Muslim extremists were behind the anthrax attacks
(and see
this
and
this
)
And the anthrax letters pushed a terrified Congress into approving the Patriot Act
without even reading it
. Coincidentally, the only Congressmen who received anthrax letters were the
ones who were likely to oppose the Patriot Act
.
And – between the bogus Al Qaeda/Iraq claims and the FBI’s fingering of Ivins as the killer – the FBI was convinced that another U.S. government scientist, Steven Hatfill, did it. The government had to pay Hatfill
$4.6 million
to settle his lawsuit for being falsely accused.
Ivins’ Convenient Death
It is convenient for the FBI that Ivins died.
The Wall Street Journal
points out
:
No autopsy was performed [on Ivins], and there was no suicide note.
Dr. Nass
points out
:
FBI fails to provide any discussion of why
no autopsy was performed, nor why, with
Ivins under 24/7 surveillance from the house next door,
Garbage being combed through, the
FBI failed to notice that he overdosed and went into a coma.
Nor is there any discussion of why the FBI didn’t immediately identify tylenol as the overdose substance,
and notify the hospital,
A well-known antidote for tylenol toxicity could be given (N-acetyl cysteine, or alternatively glutathione). These omissions support the suggestion that
Ivins’ suicide was a convenience for the FBI. It enabled them to conclude the anthrax case, in the absence of evidence that would satisfy the courts.
Indeed, one of Ivins’ colleagues at Ft. Deitrich
thinks he was murdered
.
Whether murder or suicide, Ivins’ death was very convenient for the FBI, as dead men can’t easily defend themselves.

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