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'DIRTY BOMBER' HUNT

By NILES LATHEM

January 10, 2004 -- EXCLUSIVE

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence agencies have launched a worldwide manhunt for al Qaeda's master bombmaker, who may be building a "dirty" bomb and other new devices for terror attacks inside the United States, sources said.

U.S. counterterrorism officials told The Post it was new information about the activities of Egyptian-born bomb maker Midhat Mursi, in part, that led the Bush administration to secretly dispatch Department of Energy radiological detection teams to New York and four other cities over New Year's Eve.

Before the Bush administration decided to raise the nationwide alert level to Code Orange, an al Qaeda informant had said that Mursi, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Khabab, was active again, intelligence officials told The Post.

Intelligence officials said Mursi is a chemical engineer who was head of al Qaeda's weapons-of-mass-destruction committee and reported directly to al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

He is believed to have gone underground before or during the 2001 Afghanistan war and is considered the most wanted al Qaeda figure after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Before the Afghan war, Mursi operated crude laboratories at an al Qaeda complex near Jalalabad, where satellite imagery showed scores of dead animals outside, victims of ghoulish experiments with anthrax and other biological and chemical poisons, U.S. officials said.

Sources said documents found at the camp and at al Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan also included what one intelligence official called "very innovative designs for explosive devices" - some designed to be carried aboard airplanes without being detected.

Some documents indicated Mursi was exchanging information with Palestinian and Hezbollah bomb makers - including some who helped design the shoe bomb carried aboard a Paris-to-Boston flight by Richard Reid in 2001, sources said.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1055431/posts

"Flaws raise red flag on Linux security "
ComputerWorld ^ | JANUARY 09, 2004 | Jaikumar Vijayan

Posted on 01/10/2004 12:20:46 PM PST by Bush2000

"Flaws raise red flag on Linux security

But many users remain confident about the security of the open-source environment"

Story by Jaikumar Vijayan

ARTICLE SNIPPET: "JANUARY 09, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - A report earlier this week about a critical flaw in the Linux kernel was the latest in a series of recently discovered security problems with the popular open-source operating system. But many users were unfazed by the report and said Linux remains a solid and secure environment for running enterprise applications.

Poland-based iSec Security Research on Monday said it had found a critical flaw in a function used to manage virtual memory on Linux systems (see story). The flaw affects the 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 versions of the Linux kernel, according to iSec.

The vulnerability could allow attackers to take administrative control of compromised systems and run attack code of their choice, an iSec advisory stated. ISec claimed that it had developed and successfully tested code that was capable of exploiting the flaw, although it added that actually launching such an attack wouldn't be easy.

The news follows the discovery of a similar flaw in the Linux 2.4 kernel last fall. In November, unknown attackers used that flaw to take down several servers belonging to the Debian Project, which produces a noncommercial Linux distribution. And last month, an attack on the Gentoo Linux Project compromised a server that was being used to download copies of Gentoo's Linux source code by users.

The rise in such incidents can be attributed to Linux's growing popularity, which makes it a more attractive target for malicious attackers, said David Wreski, CEO of Linux security vendor Guardian Digital Inc. in Allendale, N.J."