Day: April 21, 2017

17 Mexican state governors from the past decade are either in jail, under investigation, or on the lam

2 Comments

❝ When Javier Duarte stepped down from office last October, the former governor of Mexico’s Veracruz state vowed to fight the mounting corruption allegations that unraveled his tenure…

Then, Duarte disappeared.

❝ It would be another half-year before the he surfaced — this time in handcuffs, escorted from his hotel at a lakeside resort in Guatemala on Saturday night. Authorities say he had been squirreled away in a hotel room with his wife, attempting to pass as a tourist.

❝ Now he is in a prison cell in Guatemala City, awaiting his widely expected extradition back to Mexico, where Reuters reports he’ll face allegations that he diverted public funds for his personal enrichment. That includes a luxury ranch — packed with paintings by masters such as Joan Miro and Leonora Carrington, the BBC reports — that authorities say was paid for by siphoned dollars.

❝ During his roughly six years in office, Duarte’s Gulf Coast state also earned the inglorious distinction of becoming “one of the world’s most lethal regions for the press,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The CPJ estimated last year that at least 12 journalists were murdered during Duarte’s tenure; other organizations have placed that number even higher.

And that’s only one of the scumbags the headline references. Please RTFA and understand the elected criminals in charge are little different from the criminals officially belonging to gangs.

Crooked stock market investor pretended to be Islamic “terror” bomber

Leave a comment

❝ A 28-year-old German-Russian citizen took out a five-figure loan to bet that Borussia Dortmund shares would drop, then bombed the soccer team’s bus in an attack he tried to disguise as Islamic terrorism in a scheme to net millions…

The suspect, identified only as Sergej W. in line with German privacy laws, was arrested by a police tactical team early Friday near the southwestern city of Tuebingen…

❝ …Prosecutors’ spokeswoman Frauke Koehler told a news conference Friday…the man came to the attention of investigators because he had made “suspicious options purchases” for shares in Borussia Dortmund, the only top-league German club listed on the stock exchange, on the same day as the April 11 attack.

❝ W. had taken out a loan of “several tens of thousands of euros” days before the attack and bought a large number of so-called put options, betting on a drop in Dortmund’s share price, she said.

“A significant share price drop could have been expected if a player had been seriously injured or even killed as a result of the attack,” according to prosecutors…

❝ Investigators found notes at the scene claiming responsibility on behalf of Islamic extremists, which Germany’s top security official, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, said was a “particularly perfidious way to toy with people’s fears…”

“The fact that someone wanted to enrich himself by killing people to influence the stock market is particularly reprehensible,” he said.

Adds new meaning to “making a killing in the stock market”.

Either Microsoft is on their toes – or the stuff hackers steal from the NSA really is past its sell by-date

1 Comment

❝ Just as the Shadow Brokers hacker group started crowing about a dump of never-seen-before flaws in Windows, Microsoft announced it already had fixed most of the exploits.

“Today, Microsoft triaged a large release of exploits made publicly available by Shadow Brokers,” Microsoft Principal Security Group Manager Phillip Misner wrote in a Friday post.

“Our engineers have investigated the disclosed exploits, and most of the exploits are already patched,” he added.

Three of the dozen zero day vulnerabilities aired by the hackers, which they claimed were part of a large cache of data leaked from the U.S. National Security Agency, did not work at all on Windows 7 and above…

❝ As of the most recent patch cycle, no supported versions of Windows were vulnerable to the Shadow Brokers exploits, said Bobby Kuzma, a system engineer at Core Security.

“In other words,” he told TechNewsWorld, “for the love of God get XP, Vista and 2003 Server off of your networks.”

Har.

I know Microsoft users aren’t the most diligent of users of contemporary computing software and hardware. It was true through the 22 years I functioned within that milieu. I left over a decade ago and from what I read and hear – ain’t anything improved.

Basic security procedures still require regular backups and keeping your patches up-to-date. There’s more; but, too many folks don’t make it to the minimum.