American's Most Wanted on The Chicago Syndicate - 11/08/08 Episode

Roy “Bubba” Massey
Cops say notorious bad boy Roy "Bubba" Massey led Arkansas State Police on a high speed chase that ended in a fiery crash before he was taken into custody.

Russell McCollum
Police say Russell Victor McCollum appears to be a responsible, straight-laced guy; cops in Tennessee say he's anything but.

Joseph Roman
New York City Det. Kenny Kearns had mixed feelings about pursuing his latest fugitive, Joseph Roman, because Roman once worked in his family's restaurant in the Bronx. "The streets got him," Kearns says, and in turn, cops say Roman got involved in a murder.

Candido Peraza
Cops in Ontario, Calif. are determined to bring Candido Renteria Peraza to justice for the fatal hit-and-run of 7-year-old Nathan Sitompul. Cops say a drunken Peraza struck Nathan, who was riding his bike at the time. Peraza stopped, but when he saw Nathan struggling to get to his feet, Peraza took off, running over Nathan again.

James Perry
Cops want accused North Carolina drug slinger James Ricky Perry off the streets and back behind bars. They say Perry has been dealing since the 1980s, and not even a stint in the slammer could change his ways.

Humberto Fortanelli
Police say Humberto Fontanelli and his cellmate David Ray escaped from a Fordyce, Ark. prison on New Year's Eve 2007. Cops picked up Shannon Ray four days later, but say that Fortanelli is still on the run. AMW sat down with Ray and got a first-hand look at exactly how the escape went down, and where his co-partner in crime, Humberto Fortanelli, could be hiding out.

Shannon Ray
Dental floss and razors might have gotten David Ray out of jail, but they weren't enough to keep him out. Ray was arrested in the early morning hours of January 4, 2008 by cops in Memphis, Tenn.

Unknown Melissa Witt Killer
On January 13, 1995, cops in Arkansas made a gruesome discovery in the Ozark Mountains: the body of beloved Forth Smith teenager Melissa "Missy" Witt, brutally murdered. Now, John Walsh and the AMW team are working to hunt down a killer.

Unknown Ann Pressly Killer
Cops in Arkansas are searching for the unknown suspect who beat a television anchorwoman to death. Anne Pressly, 26, died nearly a week after she was beaten in her home, and as a precautionary measure, cops have distributed pepper spray to local television news personalities who may be targeted as well. Police say the pepper spray was donated by an anonymous donor.


Anthony Forgione
Okaloosa County Sheriff's Deputy Anthony Forgione, 33, was shot and killed by a suspect who had barricaded himself inside a Fort Walton Beach home. Cops say the suspect, Mark Rohlman, was committed for a mental evaluation, but left and hid inside his childhood home with a shotgun. Deputy Forgione entered the home with the Sheriff's Office Special Response Team when he was fatally wounded by the suspect's gunfire, according to police.

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Has the Russian Mafia Stolen Over 500,000 Bank and Credit Card Accounts?

Researchers at RSA's FraudAction Research Lab discovered one of the largest stolen data caches ever. Over the last 30 months a trojan virus, known as Sinowal, Torpig and Mebroot by various anti-virus companies, has stolen 270,000 online banking account credentials and 240,000 credit and debit account numbers. The virus is so sophisticated that it changes constantly to avoid detection by anti-virus programs, in fact, a test of the most recent virus showed that only 10 out of 35 security applications were able to detect it.

Sinowal works by hiding in the Master Boot Record of computers waiting till its victims visit one of 2700 bank and e-commerce sites where it displays new fields in to the existing website to capture personal and private information such as Social Security numbers, account numbers and passwords.

At this point it is not apparent who is behind the attacks but there is some interesting, if not revealing, evidence that suggests the Russian Mafia may be behind this crime.

Sinowal was tied to the Russian Business Network in its early days. The Russian Business Network was a hosting company in St. Petersburg, Russia that was disbanded last year after media pressure due to thier cyber-crime friendly policies and clients. With 500,000 stolen identities and accounts from at least 27 countries it is interesting that none were from Russia. Additionally, one of the Sinowal web servers also contained a spoof of the U.S. Marshals Web Site with bogus wanted posters for famous Russian people such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Leonid Brezhnev, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Vladimir Putin. What's more interesting is that these names were also the user names for gang members that logged in to this illegal web server.

Is all this proof? No, but that will be difficult to obtain. It does lead to a high level of suspicion though. Identity Theft Labs has stated previously that we fully expect large criminal organizations to become involved in identity theft, if they haven't already, because it is profitable and low risk. The Russian Mafia has already taken their operations in the U.S. in to other non-traditional income streams such as insurance fraud and personal injury lawsuits. Can identity theft really be far behind or have they already entered this criminal market? It may not be proven but the odds say that they have already hatched their master plan.

Thanks to Identity Theft Labs

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Organized Crime Increasing Activity on the World Wide Web

Research findings from Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) latest Security Intelligence Report indicates that organized crime activity on the Internet is increasing and more general awareness and education should be increasing as well.

Mohammad Akif, national security and privacy lead for Microsoft Canada, explains the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is conducted semi-annually, with its most recent volume spanning the six-month period from January 1 to June 30, 2008. Data is collected by analyzing over 450 million unique computers around the world, in addition to utilizing other security and vendor Web sites, such as the National Vulnerability Database
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Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the report, Akif said, is realizing that organized crime on the Internet continues to increase.

“As the operating system (OS) becomes harder to attack, hackers and criminals are moving to the application layer,” Akif said. “In the last six months, 90 per cent of the vulnerabilities that were disclosed affected applications, whereas only 10 per cent affected the OS.”

Akif said the majority of today's malicious activities are driven by a motive for financial gain. As such, in Canada, he said the rise of malware or potentially unwanted software (PUS) is increasing. To put things into perspective, Akif said for the first six months of the year, there were 72 per cent more distinct computers found in Canada that reported malware or PUS, compared to findings from the last report.

The top two categories that were reported for disinfected machines in Canada were Trojan downloader and droppers at 24.7 per cent, and Adware at 23.2 per cent. PUS ranked third, coming in at 21.8 per cent. In Canada, Akif said the top threat is Zlob, a Trojan downloader and dropper. Zlob, he explains, takes advantage of Internet users by opening up pop-up boxes that appear to be official, but in fact, aren't.
“These will be boxes like, ‘You have spyware, so click here for free software to get your computer clean,'” he said. “Depending on the intensity and severity of this, your computer can then be breached and compromised. We saw 86,000 variants of Zlob in the last six months and we feel the reason this number is so high is because there's a financial upside to it.”

PUS is also another problem for users to be cautious of, Akif said. PUS will notice end-user buying patterns and behaviour on the Internet. In Canada, this PUS is better known as ZangoSearchAssistant. By monitoring end-user purchasing habits and online behaviour, reports are then sent back to servers, which in turn store and sell the information to companies that can then solicit messages out to try to make money.
The key to solving these vulnerability problems, Akif said, is to raise general awareness levels. Akif said some people aren't educated about, or are simply unaware of security practices they could use to protect themselves and their workplace and information.

“Customers should be enabling a firewall, enabling automatic updates with Windows Vista, Windows Server and Windows XP, and they should also be installing up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware programs,” he said. “Users should also not go to Web sites they don't trust and should uninstall software they don't frequently use.”
To further help educate the market on security practices, Microsoft is currently in the process of updating its partner portal and is working to get programs such as its Hack and Defend workshops in place. Hack and Defend, Akif said, is a workshop designed for Microsoft partners and customers.

“This is a free workshop that Microsoft is conducting for partners to come in and see how some of these attacks are being conducted,” he said. “We show them what can be done to protect against and to prevent them from happening. These workshops will be conducted in the Q3, February and March 2009 timeframe. We're still figuring out which cities we'll have these workshops in, but we'll also have them available as Web casts for customers to participate in too.”

Thanks to Maxine Cheung

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