cryptogon.com

Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner’s inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to national security.

The proposals, which run counter to a centuries-old British tradition of open justice, were introduced to a sparsely attended House of Commons yesterday by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke – and met almost no opposition. The planned changes to the British justice system follow lobbying of the Government by the CIA.

Since then, Symantec’s investigations suggest that a “few hundred systems have been infected at a handful of companies,” many of which are in Europe.

Another IT security firm, McAfee, is also working on the virus. McAfee and Symantec both believe that Duqu shares strong similarities with the Stuxnet virus.

Some of its source code matches that of Stuxnet and because the Stuxnet code is not known to be available online, they say it is likely that Duqu was created by the same people or that they sold the code to another group. While it remains unclear where Stuxnet came from, the New York Times reported in January 2011 that Stuxnet was developed by the American and Israeli governments.

But there are significant differences as well between Duqu and Stuxnet.

“Duqu is not spreading like Stuxnet,” said Wüest, “Duqu was carefully placed and can be controlled remotely.”

Experts believe that Duqu has been used to target only a limited number of organizations for the specific assets.

He puts them on. Around him are the faces of people whom he trusts. They fight the darkness with him. The soldier’s re-lived this scene in his head and the laboratory over and over again, until it has become reassuringly familiar. The soldier knows that his pixelated friends will take him away from these troubled dreams. When the scene is over, he takes off his goggles and looks around him. The soldier is home.

In the current budgetary environment, the United States can no longer afford to give away billions of dollars every year to corporations earning billions of dollars in profits and costing American taxpayers twice: at the pump and through the tax code. We urge the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to consider eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels as an excellent source of deficit reducing savings. According to a coalition of organizations, eliminating subsidies to the fossil fuels industry could reduce our national debt by up to $122 billion over ten years.

$122 billion is a lot of cash to be directing towards some of the most profitable companies in the world. Can anyone think of anything that could use $122 billion more than Exxon or Chevron? I certainly can’t. After all, our nation’s infrastructure is in tip-top shape, it’s not like we’re in the middle of a foreclosure crisis or anything, everyone is employed, and we’ve already got more clean energy than we know what to do with!

The new details showed the cyber attack was more serious than previously thought, as Nasdaq OMX Group had said in February that there was no evidence the hackers accessed customer information.

It was not known what information the hackers might have stolen. The investigation into the attack, involving the FBI and National Security Agency, is ongoing.

“God knows exactly what they have done. The long term impact of such attack is still unknown,” said Tom Kellermann, a well-known cyber security expert with years of experience protecting central banks and other high-profile financial institutions from attack.

The case is an example of a “blended attack,” where elite hackers infiltrate one target to facilitate access to another. In March hackers stole digital security keys from EMC Corp’s RSA Security division that they later used to breach the networks of defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp.

Nasdaq had previously said that its trading platforms were not compromised by the hackers, but they attacked a Web-based software program called Directors Desk, used by corporate boards to share documents and communicate with executives, among other things.

By infecting Directors Desk, the hackers were able to access confidential documents and the communications of board directors, said Kellermann, chief technology officer at security technology firm AirPatrol Corp.

Investigators have learned that hackers were able to spy on “scores” of directors who logged onto directorsdesk.com before the malicious software was removed, said Kellermann and another person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Measles cases have surged in parts of Canada and the United States this year, with cases among unvaccinated children and teens driving the high numbers, public health officials from both countries will tell a major infectious diseases conference this weekend. A still smoldering outbreak of measles in Quebec is the largest in the Americas in over a decade. A still smoldering outbreak of measles in Quebec is the largest in the Americas in over a decade. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Canadian Press

An investigation into an outbreak in a high school in a town that was heavily hit by the virus found that about half of the cases were in teens who had received the recommended two doses of vaccine in childhood — in other words, teens whom authorities would have expected to have been protected from the measles virus.