E-COLI OUTBREAK IN EUROPE

E.colioutbreak

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Staff members of Berlin’s Robert-Koch-Insti-tute wear protective

gear as they investigate an organic

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CONTENTS

June 2011

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baN ofFIFA!For SaFetY



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Iran’s women’s team was cor-rectly prevented from playing a 2012 olympics qualifier wearing head scarves, FIFa said Monday.

Iranian officials were “informed thoroughly” before Friday’s match against Jordan that the hijab scarf is banned for safety reasons, football’s governing body said.

“Despite initial assurances that the Iranian delegation under-stood this, the players came out wearing the hijab, and the head and neck totally covered, which was an infringement of the laws of the game,” FIFa said in a statement.

FIFa banned the hijab in 2007 and this year extended the safety rule to include neck warmers, which were also judged a threat to cause a choking injury. Football’s rules also prohibit religious statements in team uniforms.

Iran’s football assocation has said it will complain about the FIFa delegate from bahrain who ordered the match aban-doned, and the decision to award Jordan a 3-0 victory.

“I will file a complaint to FIFa against the individual in charge of holding the match,” ali kaffashian, the Iranian Football Federation president, said Saturday in comments reported by the Fars news agency.

Jordan team officials also objected to the hijab rule before the

game, but prepared to play by declin-ing to select women who objected on religious grounds.

“The Iranian team and three Jordanian players were also banned from playing because they wore head cover,” rana Husseini, head of Jordan’s women’s foot-ball committee, told The associated Press.

“The problem is that the head cover assigned and approved by FIFa for women players to wear does not suit them as it reveals part of the neck and this is not allowed and it is not acceptable,” she said.

FIFa addressed the problem at the 2010 Youth olympics when Iran’s girls protected their modesty by covering their hair with specially designed caps.

Husseini said Jordan’s Prince ali, who joined FIFa’s executive committee last week, would seek talks to resolve the issue.

Iran also forfeited its match against Vietnam on Sunday as part of a round-robin group playing in amman, Jordan, which also includes Thailand and uzbekistan.

The winner enters a final group with asia’s five highest-ranked teams to decide which two countries advance to the London Games.

Hijab Scarf is banned for safety reasons said FIFA !

GeNeVa

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EHEC bacteria are visible

in a photo provided by the

Helmholtz Center for Re-

search on Infectious Dis-

eases on May 30, 2011, in

Berlin. (Manfred Rohde,

Helmholtz-Zentrum fuer

Infektionsforschung

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a farm worker empties cucumbers into a con-tainer before dispers-ing them in a field after failing to sell them due an ongoing food crisis in europe, in Carque-fou, France, on June 6, 2011. The current crisis is the deadliest e. coli outbreak in modern history, and the out-break is being blamed on a highly aggressive, “super-toxic” strain of e. coli.



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Dr. Stefan Kluge, head of the Intensive Care unit at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, speaks to journalists at a press confer-ence about the EHEC bacteria outbreak on June 2, 2011, in Hamburg.

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Dr. Hauke Weilert checks the infusion of an e. coli patient under-going a kidney dialysis at asklepios Hospital in Hamburg-altona, Germany, on June 6, 2011. Doctors at the asklepios Hospital start-ed to treat their e. coli patients with unorthodox therapies includ-ing antibiotics and antibodies, despite warnings by WHo and the German government.

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A man carries cucumbers collected for destruction at a greenhouse compound outside Bucharest, Romania, on June 6, 2011. Producers destroyed thousands of tons of cucumbers over the past two days, according to local media, after their production was either turned back from exports or refused for sale by supermarkets in Romania for fear of E. coli bacteria contamination.

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A man carries cucumbers collected for destruction at a greenhouse compound outside Bucharest, Romania, on June 6, 2011. Producers destroyed thousands of tons of cucumbers over the past two days, according to local media, after their production was either turned back from exports or refused for sale by supermarkets in Romania for fear of E. coli bacteria contamination.

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The source of an e. coli out-break in europe that has killed 22 people and sickened more than 2,200 is still not known. German authorities at first blamed it on cucumbers grown in Spain, causing outrage among Spanish farmers. They

are claiming they lost tens of millions of dollars due

to a slump in demand. tests showed that

Spanish cucumbers did not contain

the dangerous strain. bean sprouts from

a farm in Ger-many are now being

tested, though the first tests did not find the contamination. Cases have shown up in at least 10 countries and have left more than 600 in intensive care.

Sickened

more than

2,200 is

still not

known

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tobias Haack drives a tractor over 100,00 heads of romaine, iceberg, and 10 other types of lettuce in order to mulch them back into the ground at one of his fields on June 4, 2011 near Hamburg, Germany. Vegetable farm-ers in northern Germany are facing a crisis as public reaction to the cur-rent enterohemorrhagic e. coli, also known as the eHeC bacteria, out-break has brought vegetable sales to a near halt. Haack says he usually sells 1,000 crates of lettuce a day, though currently he is selling about 40. “I hope they don’t leave us hanging,” he says of the German government, and considers current discussions of low-interest loans to stricken farmers un-helpful. He says if the crisis continues he will face severe financial problems within two to three weeks.

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WHOwill say to Israel and Nato al-lied Forces

“stopkilling children and innocent people ”



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Cyberwar, StuxnetThe Pentagon has concluded that cyber attacks are “acts of war” and may therefore merit a full military response.

Haroon Meer

People tracking stories on hacking or cy-berwar have had a busy few months.

Headlines this week were provided courtesy of the Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy document which concluded “that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war”, and “opens the door for the uS to respond using tradi-tional military force”.

The same article carried a widely repeated (but not clearly attributed) quote from a military official who glibly said: “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.”

to many who work in information security, the threat of a full military response to a cyber offensive seems disproportional - es-pecially when many pundits were claiming that cyberwar was not even a real threat - so where did this come from and what does it mean?

Most of the established military power-houses have long realised the internet’s potential as a battleground and many have been dipping their toes tentatively into cyberwar waters for a while. The first com-puter worm ever unleashed on the internet (in 1988) was written by a graduate student from Cornell, whose father happened to be the chief scientist of the american National Security agency.

reactions to that worm spawned the com-

puter security industry as we know it today, which in turn spawned what’s becoming known as the military digital complex.

The incident in February with uS defence subcontractor HbGary and anonymous gave people a glimpse into this world and opened the eyes of many to the millions of dollars being invested in offensive computer security research. What many suspected (and a few knew) was laid open for everyone to see. Huge investments were being made in exploits & rootkits, essential components of any self-respecting cyberwar.

two incidents (separated by a few months) are worth noting here.

StuxnetIn July of 2010, a worm was discovered by a belarusian company with some interesting payloads.

The more the worm (dubbed Stuxnet) was examined, the more interesting it became. today we know that Stuxnet was written to target SCaDa systems relating to gas centrifuges. The worm contained multiple attack vectors that were previously un-known to the world and was in some ways, technically sublime.

It ultimately targeted Iranian nuclear reac-tors, and some experts claim that the worm

set back the Iranian Nuclear programme by as much as two years. estimates on the cost of building the worm swing wildly but even the highball figure of several million is a far sight cheaper than the traditional weaponry that would have been needed to achieve the same result.

We may never know for sure if the worm was written by Israel or the uS as most experts believe, but we do know that it was effective, and that it made it clear that attacks in cyberspace have effects in the real world.

Comodo HackIn March this year a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification authority named Co-modo was hacked. to understand the full repercussions of the hack, we need to take a step back for a (very) basic understanding of “SSL”.

When you visit a website over SSL (as evidenced in your browser by the familiar padlock) your web browser and the website encrypt all traffic between them. This is how you know, while doing internet bank-ing (or reading your mail), that nobody along the way is viewing your traffic.For the browser and the website to set up this encrypted tunnel, they need a trusted intermediary who can (cryptographically) vouch for the server. Your web browser contains a list of these “trusted interme-

and people in glass houses



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diaries” and you see the trusted padlock be-cause a trusted intermediary has vouched for the site.

Comodo was one of those trusted inter-mediaries. after hacking into them, the attacker was able to generate several fake certificates. This allowed them to set up fake web sites and then have them vouched for. You would think that you were talking to internet banking (or Gmail) and your browser would happily display the padlock, but all your communication could be compromised.

The attackers created fake certificates (to vouch for) mail.google.com, login.skype.com and login.live.com (among others) but once they had the ability to create certifi-cates, they could have generated them for any site they chose. This could enable mass interception of traffic and few people would be any the wiser.

Comodo traced the attack to Iran and claimed that it was a state-sponsored attack. The media swallowed it whole (Iran targets Gmail and Skype with fake SSL hack).

a few days later, however, the attacker went public. In an online statement he proved that he was indeed the real attacker, explained his motives and pointed out his age: “I should mention my age is 21... When uSa and Israel write Stuxnet, nobody talks about it, nobody gets blamed, nothing happened at all... I say that, when I sign certificates nothing should happen (sic).”

We have seen this movie before; young, tal-

ented hackers being able to achieve results

with enough impact that people attribute

their actions to a nation state. In the end,

all this power lay in the hands of a 21-year-

old hacker with an ideology. as in the case

of HbGary vs anonymous, we were given a

stark reminder of both our state of vulner-

ability and the problem of asymmetry.

The simple truth is that cyberspace is tough

to police and near impossible to protect

(with current technology). There are too

many moving pieces and defensive technol-

ogy has not yet caught up with attacks.

Stuxnet is probably the most analysed

piece of malware in the world, and we still

cannot say categorically who created it.

The difficulty

faced with

attribution means that the threat of putting

“a missile down one of your smokestacks”

is vacuous at best, or irresponsible at worst.

Now we see an increased rush to develop

cyber capabilities and, though cyber seems

to be the new arms-race, there is an impor-

tant difference.

exploits can be worked on in private

without tell-tale mushroom clouds or

double-flashes of light which betray nuclear

testing. Capabilities can be built and refined

for fractions of the cost and most impor-

tantly: There is no hint of mutually assured

destruction.

MaD kept the cold war cold, with both

sides fearing the response to launching first.

This has no cyber parallel and the possibil-

ity of false flag operations (or that even

complex-looking attacks might have been

perpetrated by idealistic youths) means that

we are just not ready to consider military

reprisal.

Then of course, we need to ponder just who

would be most vulnerable

in terms of cyber attacks?

The answer is obviously

those who are most con-

nected. Losing internet

access for a day would

mean a lot more to Wall

street than to Iran (who

have shut down access to

the internet in the past).

Firing off Stuxnet

might have seemed like

a good idea, but since

everyone is vulner-

able (and some are

more vulnerable than

others) it is possibly

a road that was better

avoided. When it comes to cyberspace, the

connected world is living in a glass house,

and we all know that people in glass houses

shouldn’t throw stones.

Haroon Meer is the founder of Thinkst ap-

plied research. He can be found on twitter

as @haroonmeer or on his blog at http://

blog.thinkst.com

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The eruption of the Puye-hue volcano in the andes mountains of southern Chile last weekend pro-vided some spectacular images of the force of nature. ash covers the landscape and thousands of people were evacuated from the surrounding rural communities. The volcano, which hasn’t been active since 1960 when it erupted after an earthquake, sent its plume of ash 6 miles high across argentina and toward the atlantic ocean.June 8, 2011

Volcanoeruptsin Chile



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iPhone or spy-phone?Security researchers have discovered that apple’s iPhone and iPad keep a minute-by-minute track of their users’ geographical location.



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iPhone or spy-phone?Security researchers have discovered that apple’s iPhone and iPad keep a minute-by-minute track of their users’ geographical location.

the researchers say iPhone synchronizes the informa-tion through the digital

media player itunes every time it finds a wireless network with-out the owners’ consent, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The american Civil Liberties union says the issue raises secu-rity concerns.

The researchers have also revealed that android phones, which use Google’s mobile operating sys-tem, store users’ geographic in-formation in a very similar way. Google says it has been collecting location data from its android

smartphones, but it has provided users with the option to turn off that feature. However, apple has not commented on the matter so far. The new revelation has sparked criticism among digital rights activists and is an eye-opener for many apple customers. apple’s general counsel, bruce Sewall, disclosed in a letter to the uS Congress last year that the information is collected anony-mously and the devices give users controls for disabling the loca-tion features, adding that apple stores the location information in a database only accessible to the company.

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E-COLI OUTBREAK IN EUROPE