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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The Mayor of Sanibel in 74’s is the same C.I.A. Director Goss just Resigns?

C.I.A. Director Goss Resigns

By DAVID STOUTMAY 5, 2006
WASHINGTON, May 5 — Porter J. Goss abruptly resigned today as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a post that had been diminished in the restructuring of the intelligence bureaucracy after the Sept. 11 attacks.
With Mr. Goss sitting next to him in the Oval Office, President Bush said the director had offered his resignation this morning. "I've accepted it," Mr. Bush said, praising the retiring director for his "candid advice" and his integrity.
The president said Mr. Goss had led the C.I.A. "ably" through a period of transition, and that he had "helped make this country a safer place." Mr. Bush did not mention a successor, but The Associated Press reported that a senior administration official said one could be chosen as soon as Monday.
Mr. Goss said it had been "a very distinct honor and privilege" to lead the C.I.A. "I would like to report to you that the agency is back on a very even keel and sailing well," Mr. Goss said. He did not explain his decision, and both he and Mr. Bush ignored questions after making their statements.
But it was no secret in Washington that Mr. Goss and John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence whose position came into existence as the result of the Sept. 11 attacks, had engaged in turf battles. Mr. Negroponte was at the Oval Office announcement, but said nothing.
Mr. Goss's time with the C.I.A. was marked by the departure of many long-time agency officials, some of whom complained that he had been overly political in his approach to his job. Mr. Goss sometimes appeared uncomfortable in the office, as when he remarked in early 2005 that the workload was heavy and he sometimes felt pulled in different directions.
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President Bush and Porter Goss in the Oval Office. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Goss's departure comes as the president and his top aides are trying to reinvigorate an administration whose public support has sagged in recent public opinion surveys. The new White House chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, has already announced some changes and has said that more are on the way. And he pointedly invited people who were thinking of leaving the administration by the end of the year to step down a lot sooner.
Mr. Goss, a former Republican Congressman from Florida who headed the House Intelligence Committee and was once a C.I.A. officer, became director in September 2004, succeeding George J. Tenet. His tenure was, as Mr. Bush said, a time of transition _ and undeniably a painful one.
The C.I.A., whose prestige had suffered from intelligence failures on terrorism and Iraq before Mr. Goss arrived, was further reduced in power and official stature by the reorganization of intelligence-gathering that followed the post-mortems over the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
The independent bipartisan commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks recommended the creation of a new post, national intelligence director, that would have supreme power over the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies in the far-flung intelligence bureaucracy.
Congress accepted that recommendation, creating the new post, which is now filled by Mr. Negroponte, former ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq. He displaced the C.I.A. director as the president's principal intelligence adviser and took what had been Mr. Goss's seat at meetings of the president's key national security aides.
When he took over the C.I.A. in September 2004, Mr. Goss vowed to work hard at "breaking some molds" and getting "more and more of our officers out of Washington." The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. were both criticized by the 9/11 commission.
Mr. Bush said today that Mr. Goss had "instilled a sense of professionalism" at the C.I.A. "He honors the proud history of the C.I.A., an organization that is known for secrecy and accountability," Mr. Bush said.
But Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a somewhat tepid statement. The senator praised Mr. Goss for his service and acknowledged that he had taken over at a difficult time. "Porter made some significant improvements at the C.I.A.," Mr. Roberts said, "but I think even he would say they still have some way to go."

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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.
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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.
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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.

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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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