Ukraine

Security research firm Sophos on Wednesday discovered attackers have launched their own presidential campaign. Attempting to exploit President-elect Barack Obama's historic victory, the spam attack sends e-mails with the subject line "Obama win preferred in world poll" and a return address of news@president.com.

Clicking a link in the e-mail takes victims to a Web page that insists on downloading Adobe Flash 9 to view a video of the first African-American president's "amazing speech." The scam is this: It's not really Flash. It's dangerous malware.

Last week while travelling in the Ukraine to keynote the European PR Congress, I had the chance to meet up with Dmitriy Khalansky the General Manager of our Kyiv office to talk about the rapidly growing PR market in the Ukraine. Every year for three years now, the Ukrainian Association of Public Relations has been putting on their annual PR Congress and growing the field of speakers and participants.

Michael Walzer in Dissent:

Michael Walzer in Dissent:

Federal prosecutors won a guilty plea Thursday from one of 11 men who made up a ring that was charged last month with the largest data theft case in history, involving tens of millions of customers of retailers, including TJX Cos. of Framingham, Mass., and BJ's Wholesale Club of Natick, Mass.

Separately the government also said it has evidence the group breached the security of many more businesses than previously disclosed.

Investigators looking into a vast international credit card theft ring extending from Ukraine and Belarus to China and victimizing nine of the largest U.S. retailers faced a central mystery: Who was orchestrating the crimes on the ground in the United States?

It turned out, investigators now say, that he was right under their noses. And it was a reference to a character in the popular U.S. comedy "Seinfeld" -- the Soup Nazi -- that helped break the case.

A criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information, a security researcher has found.

The new form of attack indicates that little progress has been made in defusing the threat of botnets, networks of infected computers that criminals use to send spam, steal passwords and do other forms of damage, according to computer security investigators.

U.S. authorities are calling it the largest hacking and identity theft case yet. But this week's indictments of 11 people who allegedly plundered millions of payment card numbers might not seriously dent the underworld where such crimes occur.

Researchers at a hacking conference [in Las Vegas] met the news with a bit of a shrug, saying the theft of credit and debit cards still will flourish.

///In 2003 was the 50th anniversary of the Watson and Crick paper. Nature magazine commissioned some articles on the occasion, and asked me to write a poem. I had trouble, wrote 3 poems which seemed to head nowhere. Until I went with a friend on a brief trip to Ticino, wandered on an alp, and saw some wonderful blue butterflies. I immediately thought of Nabokov, and the poem took shape.