June 23, 2012
by Wayne Madsen
Beginning on the evening of June 18, millions of customers of three large British banks — Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), NatWest, and RBS-owned Ulster Bank in Northern Ireland — began discovering that they had been frozen out of their on-line accounts by what the banks termed an unspecified technical computer “glitch.” [Read more…]
Experts warn W32.Flamer may have been developed by a nation state as part of cyberwarfare activities
by Nick Hopkins
guardian.co.uk,
Iran's Kharg island terminal processes 90% of the country's crude oil exports Photograph: Kaveh Kazemi/Corbis
A cyber-attack that targeted Iran‘s oil ministry and main export terminal was caused by the most sophisticated computer worm yet developed, experts have warned. [Read more…]
Hot Particles From Japan to Seattle Virtually Undetectable when Inhaled or Swallowed from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
h/t ex-skf
and from ex-skf –
“To defend TEPCO somewhat, though, it was not TEPCO who doubled the estimate of the radioactive materials released from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant; it was the government agency, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.”
By Helen Tansey
The nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Dai’Ichi power plant continues with no end in sight. Everyday we awake to fresh news about one of four reactors exploding, on fire or spewing white, grey or black fumes into the air we breath. Water used to cool the reactors has been freely flowing into the sea and ground water, thereby forever poisoning the very resource necessary to sustain life.
The good people in and around the area were evacuated over a week ago – first 3 then 10 now 20km. When the evacuee’s entered the evacuation centers they were promptly geigered, given face masks and Potassium Iodide to stave off the poisoning of radioactive material.
Outside the center, folks are learning their milk, food, tap and sea water are all reading high levels of radiation. Those who could afford to flee for safety left last week. The US military initially began voluntary evacuations of women and children last week, but has since made said evacuations mandatory.
Homes, businesses and entire towns are destroyed by the awesome force of mother nature. Thousands remain unaccounted for. Mass graves are filling up with the dead with the hope that some day some family member will identify the perished and provide them with a proper burial.
The air these people breath, the water they drink and the soil they till is poisoned forever. There is no clean up process available for radioactive material. None. Zilch. Zip.
It must feel like a living hell in Japan these days. [Read more…]
January 18-19, 2011 — Stuxnet: a violation of US computer security law, by Wayne Madsen
If a January 15 report in The New York Times, which has a dubious past in reporting on computer security and hacking issues, is true — that the United States Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy — via the Idaho National Laboratory — Siemens (which has a long-standing intelligence relationship with the National Security Agency), the CIA, Britain’s intelligence services, Germany, and Israel’s Mossad cooperated to develop the Stuxnet computer worm to disable Iranian nuclear program centrifuges, the U.S. government violated a number of federal computer security laws that prohibit the development of malicious computer programs that damage ″federal interest″ computers. The Stuxnet worm, which, according to the Times, was tested at Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons development facility in the Negev, not only infected Iranian nuclear program computers but spread to computers in other countries, including the United States. Stuxnet code was discovered through computer forensics to contain key words from the Jewish Old Testament Book of Esther, further establishing Israeli fingerprints on the malicious code. The malicious code’s file name, Myrtus, is the Hebrew word for Esther. According to myth, Esther saved the Jews from a Persian plot to exterminate them.
The New York Times article by William Broad, John Markoff, and David Sanger, three reporters who have their own questionable ties to Israeli interests, states that when Stuxnet first appeared around the world in June last year, it did little harm and did not slow computer networks. However, this is merely an attempt to let the U.S. and Israeli governments off the hook by falsely claiming that the only damage done by Stuxnet was to the centrifuge systems used by Iran to enrich uranium. Although Stuxnet likely did disable Iran’s centrifuges, causing a set-back to its nuclear program, the Stuxnet worm, contrary to The New York Times report, resulted in computer down time and disruption far beyond Iran. The disruption by a digital version of a U.S. and Israeli military first strike makes the United States government and Israel civilly liable for the damage and disruption caused by Stuxnet. [Read more…]