The contracted Fannie Mae engineer indicted Tuesday by the Justice Department for allegedly planting a logic bomb represents the beginning of a trend of insider attacks responding to layoffs and job insecurity because of the weak economy, experts say. ‘To me, this is the tip of the iceberg,’ said Mandeep Khera, chief marketing officer of security company Cenzic. ‘If a small percentage of these IT workers are going to the dark side, they could potentially cause a lot of damage.’ Federal investigators indicted Rajendrashinh Makwana, 35, a contracted Unix engineer for mortgage finance company Fannie Mae, for allegedly embedding malicious code known as a logic bomb in the mortgage lender’s computer network, which was set to detonate on Jan. 31, 2009. Had the attack been successful, the malware could have destroyed the entirety of the data on all 4,000 of the mortgage finance company’s servers and shut down the company for a week, experts say. The malware in Fannie Mae’s servers was thwarted when another engineer detected the malicious code, embedded with legitimate script. However, experts say that in many other cases, malicious code planted from the inside might not be so easily detected, especially […]
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders today that he said should ‘level the playing field’ for labor unions in their struggles with management. Obama also used the occasion at the White House to announce formally a new White House task force on the problems of middle-class Americans. He named Vice President Joe Biden as its chairman. Union officials say the new orders by Obama will undo Bush administration policies that favored employers over workers. The orders will: – Require federal contractors to offer jobs to current workers when contracts change. – Reverse a Bush administration order requiring federal contractors to post notice that workers can limit financial support of unions serving as their exclusive bargaining representatives. – Prevent federal contractors from being reimbursed for expenses meant to influence workers deciding whether to form a union and engage in collective bargaining. ‘We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests,’ Obama said during a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House. ‘I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, it’s part of the […]
The political culture wars may be going the way of the fights over the oil embargo or the Soviet missile gap. Democrats have been de-emphasizing social issues for years, finding that their positions on abortion and gay rights didn’t play well with many centrists. They also discovered that expanding the Democratic tent to include more social conservatives has boosted their appeal in Southern and Western states. Candidates for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee debated early this month. Some Republicans now worry that their recent focus on issues like gay marriage, gun rights, and late-term abortions — considered a winning strategy for years — may have backfired in the past two campaigns. Now add in the financial crisis. With voters concerned about their finances to the near-exclusion of everything else, the next few elections are likely to revolve around jobs, stimulus and tax cuts, not abortion and gun rights. ‘It’s not to say these are just symbolic issues,’ said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and a former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind. But in a time of war and financial crisis, ‘people tend to focus on pragmatic […]
Plunging DVD sales threaten to reduce profit for studio owners Time Warner Inc.,Walt Disney Co.,Viacom Inc. and News Corp., and may force them to write down the value of movies, analysts said. Fourth-quarter shipments fell 32 percent in the U.S. and Canada to 453.6 million DVDs, according to Los Angeles-based Digital Entertainment Group. The drop is the biggest since the industry-funded researcher started keeping track in 1997. The decline is being fueled by viewer shifts toward rental services such as Netflix Inc., the U.S. recession and technology that makes it easier to stream Web videos to televisions. ‘Making a movie just won’t be as profitable as it once was, Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente in New York said in an interview. ‘There will be a complete bottoms-up reconstruction of the economics of the film business. DVD sales may fall 11 percent this year and cause studios to write down new and recent titles that miss internal forecasts, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York, wrote in a report this month. Home-video sales and rentals, mostly reflecting DVDs, accounted for 68 percent of the $88.9 billion global filmed- entertainment market […]
Living in Las Vegas appeals more to men than women. Affluent adults are twice as likely as poorer folks to want to live in Boston. Young people like big cities such as New York and Los Angeles. More Americans would rather live in a place with more McDonald’s than one with more Starbucks. TELL US: Where would you live if you could? Those are some of the findings of a Pew Research Center survey out today on where Americans would most like to live. Whether they favor cities, suburbs or the countryside, almost half wish they lived somewhere else, the report found. City dwellers are more likely to dream of living somewhere else, and men in rural areas are far happier living there than women. ‘There are some more fundamental differences between men and women,’ says Rich Morin, senior editor of the Pew Research Center survey. ‘Different cities seem to appeal to different partisan ideological groups. ¦ People who are drawn to cities are typically younger people.’ Denver, San Diego and Seattle are the top picks of the 30 largest metropolitan areas. Denver is the favorite city among Republicans, and it also rates well with Democrats […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
