Some security experts are pointing to the Far East as the birthplace of the worm that wreaked havoc over the weekend on Internet servers worldwide. The Slammer worm–also known as Sapphire and SQLExp–exploits vulnerabilities in Microsoft SQL 2000 Web servers and causes increased traffic between servers. The worm started spreading about 9:30 p.m. PST on…

British police said Sunday they were pressing terrorism charges against a 29-year-old North African, one of seven men arrested last Monday in a massive raid on a north London mosque. Samir Asli was seized in Britain’s biggest “anti-terror” operation since September 11 — a night raid on the controversial Finsbury Park Mosque, which security services…

Federal authorities have begun enlisting campus police officers in the domestic war on terror, renewing fears among some faculty and student groups of overzealous FBI spying at colleges and universities that led to scandals in decades past. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI has strengthened or established working relationships with hundreds of…

As the Malaysian Prime Minister sees it, the Third World War has already begun between “the axis of evil and Satan.” In a provocative speech to delegates at the start of the annual World Economic Forum, Mahathir Mohamad painted a picture of the West, particularly the United States, facing an enemy it doesn’t understand and…

This area along the Monongahela River seven miles east of Pittsburgh used to be known as “Victory Valley” for turning out the steel used in American battleships — but it’s hard to believe it would be a target of a terrorist attack now. The mills are gone and many of the people have left. The…

The first meeting of an independent commission on terrorist attacks will not be open to the public. Aides to the commission’s chairman, Republican Thomas H. Kean, and vice chairman, Democrat Lee Hamilton, said the panel will convene privately in Washington on Monday. Its first public meeting will follow within a few weeks, said Hamilton’s aide,…

Israeli security forces on Monday barred Palestinians from entering Israel in advance of national elections, while final opinion polls showed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hawkish party leading its rivals heading into Tuesday’s ballot. Concerned about possible Palestinian attacks during the elections, security forces stepped up already tight travel restrictions on Palestinians, who will not be…

Computer experts tried Monday to determine if a virus-like attack on the Internet over the weekend originated in Hong Kong as the president of South Korea, the hardest hit nation, ordered officials to safeguard that nation’s computer networks. A U.S. Internet executive said by telephone that disruptions appeared first in Hong Kong before spreading to…

The latest virus-like attack on the Internet exposes more than a software flaw: The very strategy that managers of computer networks typically adopt for security has proven inadequate. As network technicians worked Sunday to complete repairs to damage caused by Saturday’s fast-spreading worm, government and private security experts worried that too many security managers are…

In one of his first battles at the helm of the new Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Tom Ridge will face off with an old ally: Sen. Arlen Specter, a fellow Pennsylvania Republican. But as Specter sees it, the power battle is necessary to help Ridge win a possible Washington turf war. Even before Ridge…

The FBI is questioning as many as 50,000 Iraqis living in the United States in a search for potential terrorist cells, spies or people who might provide information helpful to a U.S. war effort. Agents have fanned out across the country to interview Iraqis in their homes and where they work, study and worship. A…

A resilient 2-day-old computer worm continued to hobble the Internet Monday, infesting computer networks in Europe, Asia and America and stoking fears it will slow data transmissions for a few more days. Despite efforts over the weekend by companies around the world to patch their networks and stop the “SQL Slammer” worm in its tracks,…

Afghan intelligence officers said Sunday they had foiled a plan to launch rocket attacks on the U.S. Embassy, international peacekeepers and Kabul airport at the weekend. Engineer Amin, head of intelligence for Kabul, told Reuters his men had found 30 BM-21 rockets in the Tara Khail area near Bagrami on the eastern outskirts of Kabul…

South Korean systems engineers raced on Sunday to repair Internet networks ahead of the start of the working week, after the country’s system crashed under a global weekend attack by a fast-spreading computer worm. In what experts called the most damaging attack on the Internet in 18 months, the worm known as “SQL” (“sequel”) Slammer…

Companies cleaned up their computer systems on Sunday after a fast-spreading worm shut down Web servers in an attack that slowed the Internet for users around the world. South Korea, the world’s most wired country, was believed to be hit the hardest in the attack, which began early Saturday, spreading through network connections rather than…

A Spanish judge on Sunday remanded in custody 16 suspected extremists allegedly linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, judicial sources said. The 16, mostly Algerians, were arrested on Friday in raids in the northeastern Catalonia region, and Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said later they were preparing attacks with explosives and chemicals. After…

The FBI, investigating the 2001 deadly anthrax attacks, said on Friday it is conducting more searches for evidence on public land in Frederick, Maryland. Following up on last month’s searches, the FBI said the new searches were related to its investigation into the origin of the anthrax-laced letters mailed in September and October 2001, which…

To secure early warning of a bioterror attack, the government is building a computerized network that will collect and analyze health data of people in eight major cities, administration officials say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to lead the multimillion-dollar surveillance effort, which officials expect to become the cornerstone of a national…

In the days following the Sept. 11 attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell could find “no clear link” between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One soon appeared. On Sept. 24, 2001, I reported: “The clear link between the terrorist in hiding [Osama] and the terrorist in power [Saddam] can be found in Kurdistan, that…

“Now what do we do?” he asked. “Everyone agrees with us.” It was a politician’s overstatement, but the Indian Point opposition effort, driven by veteran antinuclear activists and a new anxiety over terrorism, has reached critical mass in a way few believed was likely even a month ago. In the two weeks since a state-sponsored…

Attorney General John Ashcroft came here today to explain to the world’s rich, powerful and just plain pushy the Bush administration’s tactics in its campaign against terror. In the process, he faced a barrage of questions, not all of them from the usual suspects. Paul Sagan, an American technology executive from Cambridge, Mass., for instance,…

The OASIS technology standards group said Thursday it has formed a committee to develop a global technical framework for the searching and sharing of suspected criminal and terrorist evidence by law enforcement agencies. The non-profit consortium formed the technical committee to enable law enforcement in different countries to meet legislative mandates, such as the U.S.…

A group of hackers described as “prolific” virus writers by one analyst has published its first e-zine, raising concerns that the portal will fuel a new wave of malicious code and virus variants. According to security intelligence firm iDEFENSE, hackers who call themselves GEDZAC, or Zoneavirus, recently published the ‘zine, titled Mitosis, which contains source…

On the 17th floor of an office building, the flow of words stops suddenly. Kevin Mitnick gets up from the conference room table and gazes out the window. His dark eyes are pensive. It’s a great view. To the north, the Getty Museum rises from a hilltop. On a street close to the office building…

The case of a Chinese businessman charged with illegally shipping missile guidance technology to China’s military has intensified concerns about foreign espionage in Silicon Valley. Qing Chang Jiang, who will be arraigned on Thursday, is at least the fourth Chinese native indicted since October on charges involving the shipment of equipment or trade secrets to…

Nominet UK was forced to suspend its WHOIS service last night after a rogue attempt to copy the entire registry of .uk domains. Spammers are thought to be behind attempts to copy the WHOIS database, attempts which started last week. Last night, though, the attack was so severe that Nominet – the national Registry for…

NTL has sacked one of its employees for “gross misconduct” after he hacked into the independent customer forum ntlhell.co.uk. The hack – which included sending the members of ntlhell.co.uk a derogatory email – took place on New Year’s Eve. The incident was traced back to someone working at NTL using one of the company’s computers.…

Microsoft Corp. chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates said yesterday in his fourth security e-letter that 8,500 Windows engineers and testers learned “to think like attackers” during last year’s 10-week coding stand-down. Their in-house hacking found “fully half of all bugs identified during the Windows security push,” Gates wrote. Now Microsoft is designing an…

Herndon-based Internet domain registrar Network Solutions Inc. said it will apologize to tens of thousands of customers whose e-mail addresses the company inadvertently released yesterday. “A few thousand” Network Solutions customers received e-mail messages that contained more than 85,000 e-mail addresses of other Network Solutions customers, said spokesman Patrick Burns of VeriSign Inc., the parent…

Beginning Feb. 2, the U.S. Customs Service will start fining shippers and ocean carriers that fail to comply with its Advance Manifest Regulation. The regulation, also known as the “24-hour rule,” requires shippers and ocean carriers that bring goods into the U.S. to electronically submit complete container manifest information to U.S. Customs through its Automated…

Technology applications, intelligence information analysis and greater coordination with other nations will help to protect U.S. borders and waterways as well as facilitate better commercial trade, said Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary-designate for border and transportation for the Homeland Security Department. Hutchinson, the former head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, spoke to several mayors today who…

Security experts are cautioning systems administrators not to overreact to news of a newly discovered attack that under some circumstances can compromise users’ HTTP authentication credentials. News of the attack began spreading earlier this week after a security company posted on its Web site a white paper detailing what it said was months of research…

A critical vulnerability has been found in the Concurrent Versions System (CVS), which is used by the vast majority of open-source projects to update and maintain source code, according to an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Coordination Center. CVS allows open-source developers to remotely update and modify the source code to projects…

A massive Internet outage that swept across Asia and slowed down service in the United States and northern Europe subsided Sunday, caused by a so-called “Slammer” message worm that could easily have been avoided, experts said. Reports of a near universal shutdown of the Internet in South Korea Saturday were accompanied by widespread problems in…

CIA officials, in an attempt to prove Washington’s accusations about Iraq’s ties to al Qaida, found a tenuous — and ultimately bogus — link, a French newspaper reported Sunday. Le Journal du Dimanche said Jordanian officials alerted the U.S. government that the uncle of one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers was linked to the…

Saudi security forces are hunting for four gunmen who killed a Kuwaiti man and wounded three Saudis during a police check in the capital Riyadh. The Saudi interior ministry said the shooting happened on Friday night at an apartment block in Riyadh’s Al-Masyaf neighbourhood. The leader of the main Saudi Islamic opposition movement in London…

The Saudi Embassy in Washington has hired lawyers specialized in immigration law to help Saudi students to register in the United States as required by the Justice Department. US authorities have asked citizens of some countries, including Saudis, who live in the country to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service under a new anti-terror…

Palestinian factions opened talks here today that their Egyptian hosts hoped would result in a cease-fire halting attacks against Israeli civilians. But few, if any, in the Arab world or in Israel think there is much likelihood that the dozen rival groups can reach a joint position on the conduct of the increasingly bitter 28-month…

Lebanese police have shot dead a man who threw a grenade during an arrest operation at a house in east Beirut. Two officers were reportedly killed and two wounded when the man hurled the grenade at their car in the Hazmieh suburb on Sunday. He was then killed by police reinforcements, the AFP news agency…

Spanish police today arrested 16 suspected al Qaeda operatives in pre-dawn raids that also netted explosives and bomb components, suspected toxic material and manuals on chemical warfare, Spanish officials said. The raids came as police in other European countries have been targeting North Africans whom they suspect of plotting chemical attacks. Most of the suspects…

The chief of Nepal’s armed police force has been shot dead in the capital, Kathmandu, by suspected Maoist rebels, police say. The police said Krishna Mohan Shrestha was killed outright while walking near his house on the outskirts of the city. His wife, Nudup, and bodyguard were also killed. They said that the three were…

India celebrated its 54th Republic Day amid unprecedented security arrangements. Tens of thousands of soldiers and police were deployed on the streets of the Indian capital Delhi as India displayed its latest military hardware in a huge military parade. Police said intelligence reports showed that some political leaders were on a hit-list of militants fighting…

The United States plans to enforce strict new security rules on Feb. 2 for imports by sea in containers, despite complaints from many shippers that they are not ready, an American official said here today. Drafted in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the rules are aimed at reducing the risk that a nuclear bomb…

Several men have been killed in a gun battle in eastern Afghanistan, after a police vehicle escorting a United Nations convoy came under fire. Gunmen attacked a convoy from the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, as it was travelling through Nangarhar province, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of Jalalabad. Two policemen were killed when…

Afghan intelligence officers said Sunday they had foiled a plan to launch rocket attacks on the U.S. Embassy, international peacekeepers and Kabul airport at the weekend. Engineer Amin, head of intelligence for Kabul, told Reuters his men had found 30 BM-21 rockets in the Tara Khail area near Bagrami on the eastern outskirts of Kabul…

A security guard opened fire with a shotgun Sunday at thousands of people gathered for a Guatemalan political convention, wounding five, police said. Police said they detained the guard, Isaias Caal Ichich, and were investigating the circumstances of the shooting, which occurred during the general assembly of the National Union of Hope party. About 15,000…

Rebels in eastern Colombia detonated a car bomb near an army patrol on Sunday, killing six soldiers and the civilian car driver, the army said. The attack took place in the same area near the Venezuelan border where rebels of the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army kidnapped British reporter Ruth Morris and U.S. photographer Scott Dalton,…

Despite the savagery of Colombia’s conflict, foreign correspondents have long enjoyed a type of diplomatic immunity, moving relatively freely through war-ravaged countryside and interviewing rebels and paramilitaries fresh from the battlefield. But Thursday’s announcement by Marxist rebels that they had kidnapped British reporter Ruth Morris and American photographer Scott Dalton has many wondering whether the…

The spate of community disturbances in the oil producing Niger Delta region has resurged again following the blockade of the river leading to a proposed Naval base by scores of women from Warri area of Delta State in protest against government neglect. Girls and women aged between 10 and 70 years, blocked the river and…

Mobs in the country’s largest city attacked foreigners and French institutions Sunday in violent protests against a French-brokered peace plan. Pillars of white smoke rose from the direction of Ivory Coast’s French Embassy, and explosions were heard from nearby. In Paris, a Defense Ministry official said France would “reinforce” its military presence in its former…

Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has accepted a peace deal to end the four-month civil war in the country. Mr Gbagbo on Saturday named former Prime Minister Seydou Diarra to head a national unity government. The plan envisages that Mr Gbagbo will cede some of his powers to the new administration. Mr Diarra was also…

Some 12 Palestinian groups start today a comprehensive dialogue aiming at reaching a joint work program and will discuss several proposed documents mainly the Egyptian document which works for freezing armed struggle for one year, while simultaneously stressing the right of resistance by all means. The sessions of dialogue, the first of its kind, sponsored…

Representatives of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) rebel group say they have been ordered out of Kinshasa by the government. The MLC has had a presence in the Congolese capital since last April, when the two sides signed a peace deal. But recent fighting and reports of atrocities in north-eastern Congo have…

Fighting in the Kivu provinces in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo poses a serious threat to the country’s peace process, the International Crisis Group (ICG) says in a new report. The ICG, a multinational analysis and advocacy organisation, said unless a peace process was “crafted specially for the Kivus and made…

Worldwide Internet traffic suddenly slowed down dramatically for hours on Saturday, after a fast-spreading computer worm clogged pipelines of the global network, officials said. Experts called it the most damaging attack on the Internet in 18 months as networks across Asia, Europe and America were effectively shut down. Even though the worst of the disruptions…

A fast-spreading, virus-like infection dramatically slowed Internet traffic, overwhelming the world’s digital pipelines and interfering with Web browsing and e-mail delivery. Sites monitoring the health of the Internet on Saturday reported detecting at least 39,000 infected computers, which transmitted floods of spurious signals disrupting hundreds of thousands of other systems worldwide. Monitors reported significant slowdowns,…

Italy’s National Security Committee is reviewing security at sensitive sites, amid fears that five Moroccans arrested this week were planning terrorist attacks. The men, detained for illegal possession of explosives, are suspected of having links to extremist groups elsewhere in Europe. Police found maps with Nato bases in northern Italy ringed and a plan of…

A U.S. official says a Torrance travel writer and two others are “in good health.” A right-wing paramilitary group on Thursday released a Torrance travel writer and two other Americans kidnapped near the Colombia-Panama border earlier this week, a government official confirmed. Robert Young Pelton, 47, author of the book “The World’s Most Dangerous Places,”…

A “forest of columns” designed to support the Pentagon when it was built 60 years ago saved thousands of people who would otherwise have died when terrorists attacked it with a hijacked airliner on Sept. 11, 2001, an expert panel said in a report released today. The study, sponsored by the American Society of Civil…

Haddad case may yet go to Supreme Court. A federal appeals court dealt the federal government another setback Wednesday in its efforts to keep the public out of deportation hearings for people snared in the federal terrorism probe. In an order Wednesday, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati rejected the Justice Department’s…