Threat Matrix: Daily Terror Threat - Thread Sixteen

Yahoo ^ | 8-02-04 | AP

[JustPiper]

Credit: The Cabal

The title refers to a daily report given to the president of the United States detailing the most serious terrorist threats against the country. To tackle those threats, the government has formed a top-notch task force to infiltrate the terror cells and cut off the danger.

"Every morning, the president receives a list of the top ten terrorist threats - this list is known as the threat matrix."

We here at FR are trying to be in conjunction with the daily reports around the world that involve threats. We try to provide a storehouse of information that takes hours of research.

YOU be the Judge and get informed.


"I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat."

Link to Thread Fifteen

Police Secure Businesses on Terror Alert
NEW YORK - Police searched trucks, blocked streets and posted machine-gun toting officers outside financial landmarks Monday, a day after the government's chilling warning that terrorists might target the buildings with bombs.

"God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers."
-- Jewish proverb

We are the "Stotters" who make ourselves aware of the
enemy who wishes to do us harm.




"What good are the color codes at all if we are suddenly hit with a bio or chem attack? There would be no warning and the danger would be instant."

"Code Red Implications
Code Red - Stay Home and Await Word."
by MamaDearest

Meet It!
Greet It!
Defeat It!

[mindspy]

The rap music, dare I call it that, is a means of gaining influence over young minds. The means justify the ends. I don't know about White supremists, I think the communists inflitrated the movement or perhaps even began it. I'm not sure I'll have to study it and think about that for awhile.

[JustPiper]

Thanks Fred!
Hey Bob? Have that translation?

[Domestic Church]

"North Korea is sharing technology information with Iran, which carries out missile tests on North Korea's behalf, the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The missile program is based on Russian technology and has been conducted with help from Russian scientists"

Considering several backpack and suitcase nukes dispersed across the nation is very harrowing when couched with the administration slow leak of Iran/NorthKorea proxy behind Al Quada and the bigger proxy of Russian technology & science behind that axis.

And I wonder of the Russian technology ... if it is of the compression sort and who would know the answer...would the congressional intell committees be privy to this level of info? Maybe we should be watching them as well as Hill & Bill.

[JustPiper]

Can we get the original arabic text even?

[knak]

I dunno! I'd love to know where it came from in the first place. (which islamic site anyway)

[JustPiper]

WHAT?! You have got to be kidding ME?!
Are they Iranian Jews?!

At your one link:

the Ghermezian brothers -- Eskandar, Nader, Raphael and Bahman -- are figures shrouded in mystery. A fiercely private Orthodox Jewish family, they refuse to grant interviews, or to be photographed. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives few biographical facts about their father Jacob and founder of the Ghermezian real estate dynasty, other than he was born in Azerbaijan in 1902
{{The target potential is now increased!}}
http://salamworldwide.com/wealth10th.html

/NOTE TO PHOTO EDITORS: Two photos accompanying this release are available on the Canadian Press Photo Network/

For further information: Inquiries by email may be directed to Triple
Five at mail@triplefive.com or by fax to (780) 444-5232; For information
about latest news on Mall of America, Court Orders, photo's and Triple Five's
profile, visit the website www.triplefive.com; Media contact: Lia Fitzpatrick,
Triple Five Group of Companies Ltd., Tel (780) 444-8100, Fax (780) 444-5232,
E-mail lia.fitzpatrick@triplefive.com

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2004/06/c9344.html

[Honestly]

If this information were not public, I wouldn't post this article, but we know that al Qaeda has extensive knowledge of SCADA, and we need to know what they're contemplating.

Out of Control BY TODD DATZ

Vitek Boden sought revenge. After he was turned down for a job with the Maroochy Shire Council in Queensland, Australia, the 48-year-old disgruntled techie unleashed his anger in early 2000 by hacking into the town's wastewater system at least 46 times. On two separate occasions, his electronic attacks (apparently he used a stolen laptop and a radio transmitter) led to pumping station failures that caused as much as 1 million liters of foul-smelling raw sewage to spill into parks, waterways and the grounds of a tourist resort. In the surrounding area on Australia's Sunshine Coast, creeks turned black.

Boden was a disgruntled ex-employee of Hunter Watertech, the company that had recently installed Maroochy's computerized sewage control system. Boden's attack became the first widely known example of someone maliciously breaking into a control system. But there have been other control system breaches, including, for example, a 1997 control tower shutdown at the Worcester (Mass.) Regional Airport and a Slammer-related disruption of the safety monitoring system at FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio.

Electric utilities, oil and gas refineries, chemical factories and even food processing plants use control systems to digitize and automate tasks once handled by people: opening and closing valves in pipes and circuit breakers on the power grid, monitoring temperatures and pressures in reactors, and managing assembly line machinery. And because these systems are now connected to corporate networks, their vulnerabilities serve as an entrée into the guts of the nation's critical infrastructure. A malicious hacker or terrorist group could conceivably take down parts of the power grid, throwing the country into darkness; they could take out emergency telephone systems or disable the floodgates to a dam. Even scarier to terrorism experts is a digital intrusion combined with a physical attack; think 9/11, but magnify the chaos by adding an electronic knockout of regional or national communication and power systems. The intent is clearly present: Raids in Afghanistan in early 2002 discovered that al-Qaida operatives had scoured websites containing information on SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) networks in U.S. water systems and the electricity grid. (snip)

Alarmism?
Unfortunately, the people with detailed knowledge of control systems security say no. Control systems are designed for efficiency and reliability, not security. In fact, "It requires very little knowledge" to hack into a control system, says Juan Torres, program manager of the SCADA program at Sandia National Laboratories. (snip)

Fatefully, the drive for efficiencies of cost and time led many companies to knock down the wall that traditionally separated those two types of networks. In the electric power industry, for example, deregulation led to more interconnectedness as executives sought more information from control systems to help make output and pricing decisions. Manufacturing executives wanted to pull up real-time information from, say, their assembly lines, to monitor how efficiently their factories were running. "As the networking evolution came through and local and wide area networks were installed, they were generally installed by IT. Operations, so as not to spend double the money, started using the corporate LANs and WANs for the control networks," Weiss says. Ultimately, this meant many control systems were connected to the Internet.

This linkage has profound security implications. Now control systems are exposed via the Internet, intranets, remote dial-up and wireless capabilities to hacks, worms, viruses and other dangerous payloads. That exposure scares Jonathan Pollet, president of PlantData Technologies, who advises companies on control system security. "With each release of worms and viruses, there are more and more customers with downtime," he says. Pollet says the Sasser worm in spring 2004 took out several oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico for two days. "They had firewalls, but worms crawled through commonly used ports like ports 80 and 139. If any type of connectivity is not turned off, a worm in a corporate network will crawl to control systems," he says. Another virus, SoBig, affected the dispatching and signaling systems of CSX Transportation, halting train service for four to six hours along the Northeast corridor."

The insecurity of these systems is manifested in plenty of other ways. Control system communications used to be proprietary; that changed when those systems began getting hooked up to enterprise networks and the Web. "The SCADA commands are now going over TCP/IP and clear text, and are highly vulnerable," says Pollet. "There's no way for a [control device] to know the SCADA command is what it says it is; there's no authentication, no encryption. They're highly vulnerable to denial-of-service [attacks] and viruses." He adds that easily downloadable TCP/IP packet-sniffing tools, such as Ethereal and Ettercap can be used to read clear text. That would allow a hacker to read and capture user names, passwords and even commands. (snip)

SCADA systems also connect to a wide variety of other communications media including public telecom networks, wireless radio, and private microwave and fiber networks. In testimony before a House subcommittee looking into control system vulnerabilities in March, Gerald Freese, director of information security at American Electric Power, talked about the interdependencies between SCADA networks and the telecommunications functions that support them. "We have to keep in mind that telecommunications is vulnerable in its role as a transport medium. It is subject to attacks such as 'man in the middle,' where transmissions are intercepted and altered, redirected or destroyed. Also, many power plants and substations use modems [vulnerable to a number of intrusion exploits] to manage equipment such as breakers, relays and switches over telephone lines." (snip)

http://www.csoonline.com/read/080104/control.html

[Godzilla]

Al Qaeda cells may attempt to combine localized guerilla operations and improvised Chemical/Biological/Radiological weapons attacks in geographic areas acessible to them in an attempt to raise the level of military operations inside the United States homeland to a level roughly equivalent to medium intensity guerilla warfare.

I'm see where you are going and agree that some degree of operations control has been put down lower. However, I am skeptical about both the scope (40 - 50 states) and level (med guerilla). I don't think the junior people have the skills yet to pull something that big off. If perchance they did, PC would go out the window pretty quick as we start rounding up any and all moslems and local militas start counter striking. Again, I don't think we are anywhere near that level. I do suspect that they are capable of launching a limited strike - say 6 targets with truck bombs and perhaps some chemicals mixed in - increase terror factor by setting off the detectors.

[Domestic Church]

"Chemical attacks, especially a persistant nerve agent, would be used to deny access for limited times to a number of critical installations (which I won't enumerate here) but the bigger the target zone, the more difficult decon ops will be, unless it is very rainy and then there is a danger of groundwater contamination."

It has been "very rainy" all summer along the east coast.

[JustPiper]

Been going through dozens of photos to see what MoA looks like 'outside' anyone?!

[Domestic Church]

" Natural antibiotics are readily available"

Aside from vinegar, raw garlic, yogurt and cranberry juice what else do you have up your sleeve?

[JustPiper]

Love your handle -g- and you are a welcome addition to TM!

[Godzilla]

I would expect to see some degree of coordination. However, unless they are using planes, the second hit could only come from a prepositioned bomb. Palis attacks in Israel have had some of that integrated in. Fire the first bomb, then do the second as help arrives and starts to organize.

[JustPiper]

Thank you both Ladies ;)

[texasbluebell]

Here's a link to a photo of the Mall of America, JP. Doesn't look anything like the sketch...

link

[JustPiper]

I cannot believe they are saing this 25 yr old kid was working/hacking/baiting for US and that he was a mole, then why hold info for 3-4 years?! This story gets crazier by the minute Liz!