Rapscallion's blog

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Vanity and lust are proving to be deadly sins for some Internet users.

A hacker group known as "Storm Botnet" over the weekend began flooding the Internet with emails, inviting Web users to watch a salacious video starring them on YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google Inc. (GOOG). One such email is headlined "OMG, what are you thinking," and reads: "this i [sic] not good. If this video gets to her husband your both dead. see for yourself..." It then provides a link to a purported video.

However, links in the emails actually point to attacker-operated sites that try to download several malicious programs onto vulnerable personal computers, according to Roger Thompson, chief technical officer at Exploit Prevention Labs, a New Kingstown, Pa., security company.

"Everybody thinks a YouTube video is perfectly safe, and in reality it is," Thompson said. "You're not actually getting to YouTube."

Once infected, victim PCs become spam machines, "zombies" that Storm Botnet can use to attack others on the Internet with floods of traffic, and Web servers that further distribute the group's malicious programs to other PCs. The attackers also plant a rootkit in victim PCs that tries to hide the malicious programs so antivirus software can't remove them. Exploit Prevention Labs' LinkScanner product protects against the threat, and the company provides free online checks of suspect links at http://linkscanner.explabs.com/linkscanner/ default.asp.

The attack exploits more than a half dozen flaws in software used by computers with Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Windows operating system, including Internet Explorer, Quicktime and WinZip. Computers that are up-to-date with all security patches are safe, unless they respond to a prompt built into the attack that cleverly invites them to click on another link if they are unable to view the video.

Storm Botnet, which commands an apparently massive network of home PCs infected with its programs, has also been responsible for a flood of malicious emails recently that have offered fake electronic greeting cards.

-By Riva Richmond, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5670; riva.richmond@ dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires
08-27-07 1841ET
Copyright (c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

BOGOTA, July 23 (Xinhua) -- The Colombian army installed its third military base with 1,000 troops on the border with Venezuela, the Colombian government said on Monday.

Governor of northeastern department Norte de Santander Luis Morelli said the base, the third to be established this year, will begin operations in October in the Catatumbo border region.

One brigade is based in Cucuta city and is already operating in Norte de Santander and a mobile base is patrolling across Ocana province.

Colombia and Venezuela share 2,219 km of border that is often illegally crossed by armed groups who extort, kidnap and smuggle drugs and gasoline.

by Garry Leech

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a peasant-based guerrilla army with an estimated 18,000 fighters, has been waging war against the Colombian government for more than 40 years. In recent years, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and US President George W. Bush have both intensified their efforts to defeat the FARC as part of the so-called war on terror. However, despite receiving more than $4.5 billion in US aid over the past six years, the Colombian government has yet to achieve a military victory. In June, I travelled to a remote jungle camp to meet with FARC Commander Raul Reyes. During a two hour interview, Reyes discussed the Para-politics scandal, the revolutionary struggle, the dirty war, child soldiers, the FARC’s controversial use of home-made mortars and landmines, Plan Colombia, Plan Patriota, neoliberalism and the prospects for peace in Colombia.

Q: What is the significance of the Para-politics scandal for democracy in Colombia?

The glaciers in the Andes mountains of Bolivia provide about half the drinking water for two million people down the mountain. But the glaciers are now melting at an unprecedented rate and will be completely gone within 20 years.The mountain's traditional guardians, the Aymara Indians, say that to ascend this 6,000-metre peak without absolution is to incur the wrath of the gods.

"They're not angry with us, they're telling us something," an Aymara priest says as he gives a blessing to local people.

"We have to live with nature in a balanced way - if we don't pollute more, and if we don't industrialise, if we learn not to pollute we'll be able to live a bit longer."

On the arid western side of the Andes mountain range, snow and ice mean water, and water is life. Now this icy realm is melting before their very eyes.

The Aymara call this place Chacaltaya, meaning "cold road". In modern times Bolivians proudly boasted that this glacier - at nearly 5,500 metres - was the world's highest ski run. But no longer: these days it looks more like a resort on the moon.

Glaciologist Edson Ramirez says the sad sliver of ice that remains will probably be completely gone within two years.

"The ice used to go right down to the road - at the bottom," he said.

Dr Ramirez says people stopped skiing there around 1998. Now should be the peak skiing season, yet there are only rocks.

Bolivia is losing more than its only ski field. Small, high-altitude "tropical glaciers" act as water reservoirs for millions of people who live in arid regions of the Andes. Dr Ramirez says most of the other glaciers in the region are also melting fast.

The Associated Press

BOGOTA, Colombia: Colombia must pay US$7.8 million (€5.8 million) in damages to relatives of 12 judicial workers killed in a 1989 massacre by army-backed paramilitaries, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered.

The May 11 ruling made public by the victims' lawyers Friday is the largest yet against Colombia by the Costa Rica-based court, which investigates human rights violations when justice cannot be guaranteed in national courts. The judgment cannot be appealed.

"It's the first time that the state has been found guilty of collaborating in the murder of other agents of the state," Rafael Barrios, a lawyer for the victims, told The Associated Press.

President Alvaro Uribe was in New York on Friday, and a spokesman for his office said no official was available to comment on the ruling. The government previously acknowledged its responsibility in the case and has in the past paid damages ordered by the court, an autonomous branch of the Organization of American States.

The 12 victims of the La Rochela massacre were killed while investigating another paramilitary massacre of 19 merchants in Santander state. Three judicial workers survived the massacre.

By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 6 (IPS) - A new U.S. government report acknowledges that coca crops expanded last year in Colombia, despite the heavy herbicide spraying carried out under Plan Colombia, which has been loudly protested by neighbouring Ecuador for causing damages to human and animal health and food crops in border areas.

"Coca will never disappear," said a woman sitting in a bus ridden by this reporter from the Pacific port city of Buenaventura to Cali, in the western Colombian province of Valle del Cauca. The driver and passengers sitting nearby nodded.

For the duration of the trip, as the bus climbed the western flank of the Andes mountains, the passengers had ridden in silence, listening to music. The brief conversation occurred in the last 10 minutes, before arriving at 8:00 PM at the station in Cali, the provincial capital, when the bus drove by a police station that was destroyed by a bomb in April.

The passenger who sparked off the conversation, a black woman who looked around 25, had not heard about the destruction of the police station. She explained that she had been living for a year in a remote jungle area in the southern province of Nariño, on the border with Ecuador.

She said that earlier in the day she had spent hours riding in a speedboat on the Pacific Ocean to the port of Buenaventura, and that she was carrying the fruits of a year of work -- not money, but "merchandise."

So at the end of the trip, this IPS reporter discovered that she had travelled for hours in a public bus carrying a shipment of drugs.

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