US Atty, FBI task force targets options
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U.S. prosecutors and the FBI in  Northern California have formed a task force to investigate  allegations of stock option grant manipulation by local  companies, authorities said on Thursday.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a spate of bomb threats phoned in to businesses that resulted in employeesâ wiring thousands of dollars overseas.
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Federal Reserve officials, who are  debating whether to adopt an explicit target for inflation,  have discussed whether an implicit, or "soft" target, might be  preferable, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
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The US Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing enforcement actions against the American, Philadelphia and National stock exchanges for failing to protect
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The Feds are targeting 14 companies for possible subprime shenanigans. Who might they be?
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US authorities turn to Scotland Yard's expertise to catch one of the most wanted men in America.
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(InfoWorld) - The Chinese government has denied involvement in a series of hacks carried out against IT systems at the Pentagon in June this week, but the threat of technology-driven espionage has forced the FBI to push businesses and academic institutions to better prepare for such attacks. Little publicly-available evidence exists to prove that foreign governments have backed or planned to launch attempts to steal intellectual property from U.S. corporations and researchers, but officials with the FBI claim that the problem is real and that American organizations must begin policing their operations more aggressively today to prevent valuable data from being stolen tomorrow. In October, the FBI's Counterintelligence Domain Program -- which aims to foster cooperation between the agency and private entities to help organizations identify and protect potential intelligence risks -- will mark its first year in existence. The program is already making significant steps in helping to close the gap between businesses and law enforcement to defend intellectual property from being left vulnerable to potential theft, FBI officials maintain. "In the past, we've always been reactive to this type of scenario and essentially showed up after the fact to bring resources to bear on this type of crime, but we want to be more proactive to help businesses and academic institutions protect themselves before an incident occurs," said Tom Mahlik, who serves as chief of the Domain program for the FBI. "We've always responded aggressively to traditional espionage with investigation, such as with the theft of national secrets, but those cases really represent counterintelligence failures where the secrets are already in Beijing or Moscow and where valuable new technologies or intellectual property would already be gone," he said. Counterintelligence efforts rank second on FBI Director Robert S. Mueller's current strategic agenda, sandwiched below counterterrorism work and above the fight against all forms of cyber-crime, according to Mahlik. Thus far, the Domain project has materialized primarily in the form of relationships built between the leaders of the agency's 56 individual divisions and the leading corporate entities and research groups identified by those units as organizations that control data that criminals and governments could try to get their hands on. For instance, companies handling sensitive government work -- such as defense contractors and large IT systems integrators -- have already joined in the effort, Mahlik said. The program will be expanded over time to pull more companies into the fold that are developing cutting-edge technologies and other products that are considered to give the U.S. a technological or business-related advantage. Those relationships, and training seminars held by the FBI in the name of expanding Domain, are aimed at identifying any research, information, or technologies that might be targeted by U.S. adversaries -- and to establish an ongoing information exchange among the program's members to improve protections and reduce opportunities for theft. As for the current state of involvement of foreign nation states, including large terrorist groups, in intellectual property theft, the FBI refuses to share specific examples or hard data, but Mahlik said there should be little doubt that the problem exists. "The FBI is well aware of deliberate targeted attacks that were aimed at stealing sensitive data from organizations, including NASA, the Department of Defense, and individual defense contractors," said the FBI expert. "We're still trying to deduce the magnitude of the problem, and a lot of that has to do with what we've dealt with in terms of investigating any ex-filtration of data and where it has ended up." Mahlik said that two of the most significant trends feeding the need for corporate counterintelligence are offshore outsourcing and the heavy flow of foreign engineering talent into U.S. corporations and research institutions. While it remains hard to prove that foreigners are being trained specifically with the purpose of infiltrating U.S organizations to steal valuable data, he said that the concept is very real. "This isn't about traditional spies anymore; the engineer, student, or business partner are the threat now, and these people are being given increased access to corporate secrets, intellectual property, and pre-patent research information at universities," Mahlik said. "These types of people are being actively used to ex-filtrate key pieces of information back to their homelands as there is always a race to establish a competitive advantage." Data security in a global market David Drab, principal for the Information & Content Security group at Xerox, said that companies are increasingly coming to the imaging giant looking for new ways to label sensitive information and track its flow among users in the workplace and throughout their supply chains. Before joining Xerox, Drab served at the FBI for 27 years and observed, among other things, the flow of former KGB agents in former Soviet states into criminal organizations. A good number of those intelligence experts were trained in the art of finding holders of sensitive corporate and national defense information and trying to liberate the data, he said, and many are likely employed in efforts to steal whatever plans they can sell to others for a profit today. "This is why you have Wal-Mart hiring former government intelligence officers. It's not about spying so much as it's about identifying business risk and what is occurring with competitors in the global environment," Drab said. "These companies are creating separate entities from traditional security or IT security to allow management to identify people internally who might have access to high-level information or might be targeted by competitors or foreign entities." Drab points to the 2001 indictment of two Japanese-born individuals accused of stealing research on Alzheimer's disease from the Lerner Research Institute (LRI) in Cleveland as proof of the need for enterprise counterintelligence. One of the accused researchers subsequently pled guilty to charges of misleading investigators looking into the situation, while another, who returned to Japan to work for a quasi-government agency working on Alzheimer's research, was unsuccessfully sought for extradition to the U.S. to face trial. Among the tools developed by Xerox to help trace the use of paper documents, one of the hardest data formats to track, are gloss marks and infrared stamps used to create a trail of evidence as to who might have accessed, printed and walked off with sensitive data when copies of any stolen documents are recovered. Large companies like financial services institutions have also begun speaking publicly about the problem of international cyber-theft, saying that they are already working to deal with the problem. At the Usenix Security Symposium held in Boston in August, Jerry Brady, global head of IT security at New York-based financial giant Morgan Stanley, outlined the threat of foreign attack as a current business reality. He specifically cited emerging activity in the Far East as worrisome. "Sometimes the threats are coming from the governments themselves in different parts of the world," said Brady. "The people who want to harm us drives a lot about how we think of security awareness. We do a lot of monitoring and threat intelligence to tell who our adversaries are today and who they will be tomorrow." When asked if the government has done enough to help companies like Morgan Stanley deal with the issue, Brady said that the firm's relationship with law enforcement officials has improved over the last several years, specifically around intelligence gathering regarding new threats. However, he said that companies cannot rely on the government alone to watch out for their interests overseas. "It's popular to pin this issue on the government, but we in private industry need to play an even bigger role in addressing the problem," said Brady. "Every time we go into a new country we have to do a risk assessment, every country has its own IP protections and concepts and we know that; we know the countries where ex-KGB Soviet Bloc resources have ended up, and where we need to be even more vigilant."
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KB Home, the No. 5 U.S. home builder, said on Friday the Justice Department was looking into past stock options practices at KB, but added the agency said KB was not a target of the investigation.
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The UK and US are discussing whether to site a US anti-ballistic missile defences on UK soil.
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The inspector general for the Justice Department is also concerned that taking money from other FBI programs could hinder efforts in counterterrorism and cybercrime.
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Federal and local authorities, under the auspices of the New York Asset Forfeiture Task Force, have recently served grand-jury subpoenas seeking testimony in the circulationscandals
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A search for investing opportunities in military and defense.
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Just a few weeks ago, America&#39;s finest intel agents and analysts believed they might be on the verge of a big breakthrough in the manhunt for the world&#39;s most-wanted terrorist.
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Even before the official search got underway in Pakistan, U.S. intelligence agencies yesterday were drawing up their own list of possible suspects in the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto -- a list that includes al-Qaeda as well as elements of Pakistan's own intelligence service.
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The FBI hopes to salvage parts of a $170 million case-management software package that has come under fire amid concerns it doesn't work as the agency had expected.
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The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has awarded Lockheed Martin a $1 billion contract to build a next-generation biometrics-based identification system.The biometric collection system and database, which has raised concerns of privacy groups, would include imaging of irises, faces and other identifying characteristics, the FBI said in a news release late Tuesday. Lockheed Martin will design, develop, test, and deploy the Next Generation Identification System over the 10-year life of the contract.The new system will expand on the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division&#39;s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), primarily a fingerprint-based identification system operated in Clarksburg, West Virginia, the FBI said.&quot;IAFIS has been a fantastic tool in support of criminal justice and the war on terror,&quot; Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI&#39;s CJIS Division, said in a statement. &quot;[The new system] will give us bigger, better, faster capabilities and lead us into the future.&quot;The American Civil Liberties Union has raised concerns about the biometric database, saying it&#39;s part of the U.S. government&#39;s efforts to collect more and more information about residents.The new system will expand fingerprint capacity, doubling the size of the FBI&#39;s current database, and will also include palm prints, iris and facial recognition, Lockheed Martin said in a news release. The system will be designed to be flexible enough to accommodate future biometric technologies, the company said.Among the companies working with Lockheed Martin on the contract will be Accenture and BAE Systems Information Technology.Lockheed Martin will provide program management and oversight as well as development of biometric and large systems, the company said. Accenture&#39;s responsibilities will include interoperability and change management. BAE will work on external interface requirements engineering and security design.The FBI contract was awarded through an open bidding process. Northrop Grumman and IBM also bid on the contract.
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SEATTLE, May 25  /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Special Agent in Charge Kelvin N.