Intel and Ops Update

Analysis: Assad’s one half-truth and three lies to al Watan

April 27, 2008, 2:42 PM (GMT+02:00)

Elements of the Syrian-North Korean reactor’s cooling system

In an interview Sunday, April 27 with the Qatari daily al Watan , Syrian president Bashar Assad said: "We don’t want a nuclear bomb, even if Iran acquires one.” DEBKAfile’s military sources say that was only half true.

What he omitted to mention was the division of labor agreed between Damascus and Tehran in a potential war against Israel: The Syrian reactor Israel destroyed last September would produce “dirty weapons,” while Iran would go for a nuclear bomb. Tehran therefore funded the North Korean reactor in Syria. The radiological weapons made there were to be distributed to the terrorist organizations fighting Israel and used as leverage to control them.
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Karzai escapes Taliban attempt on his life at military parade in Kabul

April 27, 2008, 1:21 PM (GMT+02:00)

Afghan president Hamid Karzai and other dignitaries, including the US ambassador, were safe after being swiftly hustled off the saluting stand away from the explosions and gunfire. Hundreds fled. Two Afghan lawmakers were said to have been injured. According to one report, four suiciders armed with bomb vests and guns carried out the attack. The parade Sunday, April 27, marked the 16th anniversary of the Soviet Army’s defeat in Afghanistan.

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Exclusive: First frank talk of potential war on Iran from top US soldier

April 26, 2008, 10:10 AM (GMT+02:00)

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff

Addressing a news conference in Washington, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday, April 25, the Pentagon is planning for “potential military courses of action” against Iran. He spoke of the Tehran government’s “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq. A conflict with Iran would be “extremely stressing” he said, but not impossible and “it would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability.” The admiral stressed the reserve capabilities of the Navy and Air Force.
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Israel Air Force Chief: Iran is a serious threat. We should trust only ourselves

April 25, 2008, 7:37 PM (GMT+02:00)

Maj. Gen. Eliezer Shkedy

Maj. Gen. Eliezer Shkedy tells CBCNews 60 Minutes Bob Simon that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel must be taken extremely seriously. In an interview to be aired Sunday, April 27, the general said: “I think it is a very serious threat to the state of Israel, but more than this, to the whole world. They are talking about what destroying and wiping us from the earth.”

He said it reminds him of the Holocaust. “We should remember. We cannot forget, We should trust only ourselves.”
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Exclusive: Closest aide of Hamas hard-line Khaled Meshaal dies in suspicious "accident"

April 25, 2008, 10:07 AM (GMT+02:00)

Mysterious death in Damascus of his top aide

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that Hisham Faiz Abu Libda, Khaled Meshaal’s chef de bureau, was killed in Damascus by a hit-and-run car. Syrian authorities have ordered a blackout on the incident. His was the second mysterious death of a high-profile terrorist in the Syrian capital in recent weeks after Hizballah’s military chief Imad Mughniyeh was blown up in a high-security district on Feb. 13.
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Analysis: Assad caught red-handed may now go for revenge

April 25, 2008, 6:54 PM (GMT+02:00)

Ready for nuclear fuel rods as per North Korean model

US and Israel intelligence experts upgrade the chances of president Bashar Assad retaliating for the Israeli attack, which irreparably damaged the secret nuclear North Korea built for him in eastern Syria - now that the episode is out in the open. DEBKAfile quotes those experts as recalling Saddam Hussein’s burning ambition to hit Israel’s nuclear site at Dimona after Israeli jets smashed Iraq’s French built nuclear reactor in 1981.
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• What's With Port 20329?, (Sun, Apr 27th)

  - 8 hours ago

  According to the DShield Trends report, tcp/20329 is way out of line for the past couple of days.nb ...(more)...

• Clear Iranian role in Baghdad violence: military

  - 12 hours ago

  Iraqi and US military commanders on Sunday claimed a clear Iranian role in violence engulfing Baghdad's Sadr City, where Shiite militiamen have been battling security forces for the past month.

• The originator of “Red Heart China” gets his website hacked!! Europeans responsible?

  - 1 day ago

  Started to wonder why all those hearts were appearing on Chinese blogs and the answer may just be, the Red Heart China MSN : About 2.3 million Chinese MSN users have added a pattern of “red heart” and the English w...

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Microsoft didn't crush Storm, counter researchers

menelaus writes "Microsoft Corp. didn't crush the Storm botnet as it has claimed, rival security researchers argued today. Instead, the criminals responsible for the army of compromised computers diversified last year to avoid attention and expand their business.

Paul Ferguson, a network architect, and Jamz Yaneza, a research project manager, both at Trend Micro Inc., disputed Microsoft's contention that its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) had beaten Storm into submission.

The MSRT is a program that Microsoft updates and automatically redistributes to Windows users each month on Patch Tuesday. It includes definitions for the most popular malware, sniffs systems for malicious code and then deletes it. Microsoft first added detection for the Storm Trojan horse in September 2007.

By the company's count, the MSRT cleaned more than 526,000 Storm-infected PCs in the final four months of last year. After some back and forth between the Storm bot herders and Microsoft, the former gave up, said Jimmy Kuo, a senior security architect at the company.

"Even though they were able to maintain parts of their botnet, they knew they were in our gun sights," Kuo said in an interview earlier this week. "And ultimately they gave up."

Not so fast, said Trend Micro.

"The MSRT had an impact on Storm," Ferguson acknowledged, citing Trend Micro statistics that showed a 20% to 25% reduction in the number of bots within the Storm botnet late last year. "But there are some key gaps in the reality on the ground.

"Storm is still out there," he said. And active. "We've seen campaigns to renew their [botnet] body count within the last 48 hours," Ferguson said.

The full article can be found at computerworld.com." Like I said...others have picked up where storm may have dropped off. It doesn't sound like Storm has really dropped off that much. Its a much more difficult scenario now with smaller botnets running from more locations all over the world.

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