Prisoner Abuse Probes Undermine Pentagon Claims; DHS Funds Shifted to Large Cities: New Worm Exploited Google Flaw

Prisoner Abuse Probes Undermine Pentagon Claims

The Washington Post reports that documents released yesterday describe multiple cases of threatened executions of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers, as well as of thefts of currency and other private property, physical assaults, and deadly shootings of detainees at detention camps in Iraq. According to the Post, the variety of the abuse and the fact that it occurred over a three-year period undermine the Pentagon’s past insistence that it mostly involved detainee humiliation or intimidation rather than the deliberate infliction of pain.

Read the full story in the Washington Post.DHS Funds Shifted to Large CitiesNew York Times.

The Department of Homeland Security is shifting more of its $3.5 billion in antiterrorism grants to the nation’s largest cities, according to a story in the New York Times. The Times reports that the biggest beneficiary of the shift is New York City, and that Washington, Los Angeles, and Boston are also getting larger amounts.

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New Worm Exploited Google FlawPC Advisor.

A new worm, known as Santy A, takes advantage of a critical software vulnerability in the free phpBB open source software widely used to create and maintain online bulletin boards, according to a report in PC Advisor. The story reports that Santy uses Google to find web addresses that use a special string, viewtopic.php, common to bulletin boards using the phpBB software. It appears the worm may use a vulnerability in the PHP scripting language that was recently patched, according to Alexey Zernov of antivirus company Kaspersky Labs.

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