Inquiry into Yemen Tanker Blast; Intelligence-Sharing Report Due out Today; Bugbear and Two More New Worms

Inquiry into Yemen Tanker Blast

The anti-terrorist branch of the Paris prosecutors office has opened an inquiry into yesterdays explosion on board a French tanker carrying 400,000 barrels of Saudi crude oil off the coast of Yemen, according to the BBC News. Officials of tanker owner Euronav said their understanding was that the captain, Hubert Ardillon, saw a small fishing boat pulling up to the tanker before the blast. In October 2000, a small boat filled with explosives rammed the American warship USS Cole as it refueled at another Yemeni port, setting off a blast that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Last month, the BBC notes, the U.S. Navy warned of possible attacks on oil tankers in Gulf waters by al-Qaeda. Intelligence-Sharing Report Due out TodayNew York Times a bipartisan report by some of the nations leading information technology and national security experts, called Protecting America’s Freedom in an Information Age, will be released today. The 173-page report recommends that the Bush administration develop a system to share intelligence gathered in the United States and abroad among local, state and federal agencies while developing guidelines to protect against abuses. Although the Bush administration did not commission the report or formally participate on the 44-member panel that studied the issues for more than six months, the Times reported, senior administration officials who followed the groups work praised the effort.

According to story in todays

Bugbear and Two More New Worms Boston Globe, the worm known as W32.Bugbear, or I-Worm.Tanatos, continues to spread and constitutes the most severe attack this year. It was first spotted a week ago and has spread to dozens of countries. It infects computers that use Microsofts Windows operating systems. Some subject lines for the e-mail are “bad news, Membership Confirmation, Market Update Report and Your Gift. A story from Reuters last Friday said Malaysian cyber detectives were tracking the worm which was thought to have originated there. Reuters quotes Raja Azrina Raja Othman, deputy director of the government’s National Information, Communications Technology Security and Emergency Response Center (NISER), as saying, We are analyzing the worm but we find no justification to the claim that it was discovered in Malaysia or may have even originated here. She said, however, that Bugbear was easily spreading, and that the person who invented the Bugbear may have had [credit card fraud] in mind, but we dont see the worm exploiting that feature very much. Meanwhile, the UK-based Register reports today that amid the focus on Bugbear, two new worms went largely unnoticed until now. The Mighty worm uses the well-known OpenSSL exploit to gain access to and infect computers running an Apache Web server on Linux. Windows users face an additional threat from the Opaserv worm, whose main spreading mechanism is via network shares.

According to an Associated Press story in todays