Tom Saari

State kills wolves in wake of teacher death
CHIGNIK LAKE: Pair were believed to have attacked woman while she jogged.

By JAMES HALPIN
jhalpin@adn.com

(03/15/10 23:03:52) State officials on Monday found and killed two wolves thought to be responsible for killing a teacher in Chignik Lake last week, according to the Department of Fish and Game.

The wolves were found in the Chignik drainage a week after the March 8 death of 32-year-old Candice Berner, a special education teacher killed in an apparent wolf attack while jogging along a remote road, according to Alaska State Troopers. Troopers say they think at least two or three wolves were involved in the attack.

They and a state Department of Fish and Game biologist have been in the Alaska Peninsula community since late last week seeking to capture or kill the wolves, though blowing snow had prevented them from taking to the air.

On Monday, winds settled enough to let them get a look around, Fish and Game spokeswoman Jennifer Yuhas said in an e-mail. As of Monday evening, searchers had found old tracks but had not seen or killed any wolves, she said.

A subsequent aerial outing turned up two of the wolves, she said. One of them was lighter than the other, which appeared to be more healthy, she said.

“The wolves taken match descriptions of wolves seen at the recent fatality site of Candice Berner,” Yuhas said in an e-mail. “They will undergo a variety of tests including rabies. It will be very important to learn as much as we can from the samples we have obtained. Genetic material from all biological samples (wolves) taken will be compared to samples taken from the victim.”

State officials plan to resume searching for more wolves this morning, she said.

Yuhas said no fresh wolf tracks have been reported near town. But townsmen have reported sightings of wolves in and near town in recent days. Local hunters began patrolling for the wolves after Berner was killed, but have so far not killed any, stymied by conditions and terrain, she said.

Berner, a special education teacher based in Perryville, was originally from Slippery Rock, Pa., and arrived in Alaska last August. She stood about 4 feet, 11 inches tall and was an athletic person, an avid runner, according to her family. Officials from the Lake and Peninsula School District said Berner, who rotated among five villages and arrived in Chignik Lake on Monday, left work at the end of the day to go for a run.

A group of snowmachiners found her a short time later. Her gloves were in the road and Berner’s body had been dragged off the road down a hill. Troopers say the wolves partially predated her and inflicted severe damage to her throat in the attack.

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Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.

Jan this year was fun, a variant of Vundo and Gumblar came roaring back.  It infected my desktop and 70 of my websites before I know it was even here.  It happened on Jan 14th to me, but looks like it was unleashed around December 2009 January 2010.   It redirected google results to ad pages but not all of the time if I backed out and clicked again it would let me through.  From what I can tell this is the largest attack in a while and a major security breach, stealing passwords and usernames from all kind of programs, ftp seems like its preferred data so it can spread itself and take over your websites.

Here is a link to the tool I used to remove the rogue code from over 7000 files it infected of mine in 1 day.   http://justcoded.com/article/gumblar-family-virus-removal-tool/

I believe mine came in with a variant of the Vundo trojan and installed a variant of the gumblar spyware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumblar<

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vundo<

It seems to be Asia and now migrating to the U.S.

;Gumblar botnet builder resurfaces with a vengeance<

http://www.mxlogic.com/securitynews/viruses-worms/gumblar-botnet-builder-resurfaces-with-a-vengeance335.cfm

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Though security researchers had believed it to be more or less dormant, the Gumblar malware came storming back into prominence at the turn of the decade, performing what Softpedia calls a “mass injection attack” on computers and websites around the world.

Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010

Police begin Gumblar virus probe
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100110a7.html

Kyodo News

Tokyo police have begun investigating suspected cases of unauthorized Internet access after a number of companies reported that their Web sites had been altered, apparently by the Gumblar computer virus and its variants, Metropolitan Police Department officials said.

The department’s high-tech crime investigators believe IDs and passwords were used to access the sites in many of the cases that have been reported since mid-December. Viewers of these altered sites were redirected to other Web sites containing malicious software.

Hackers Compromise Fox Sports Website
http://www.spamfighter.com/News-13713-Hackers-Compromise-Fox-Sports-Website.htm

According to a warning released by security researchers, the Fox Sports website, an integral part of the Fox Broadcasting Company, has gone under the control of unknown hackers. The hackers injected malware inside the ‘custom error’ section of the site. Two different malicious codes have been found, each as a result of a different infection.

and the best article I found so far is from Scansafe -

To load the malware from the backdoored websites, tens of thousands of other compromised websites have had malicious iframes embedded. Alarmingly, Web surfers who visit one of these conduit sites will be exposed to a collection of exploits designed to silently install the Gumblar malware.  On Windows systems, the installed malware loads when sound-enabled sites or devices are accessed.  It also injects itself into the Internet Explorer process and intercepts all Web traffic to and from the computer.  Any captured FTP credentials are sent to the attacker thus furthering the growth of the Gumblar website botnet.

 

Even in a down economy Walmart seems to be on top of things.  They figured out employees are willing to wrestle for raises, and people will pay to watch them do it.  Someone in the front office was thinking.

Cold wet rainy day.  Good times.

 

What a punch, and at the speed of light, no real way to detect it until after it hits it target.  Hopefully they can get this into the field to save some soldiers lives.

Had a little hiccup yesterday and the blog was done.  It is back up now with all kinds of things to report.

Urlacher out for the season, but one good lick on a qb this year.

 The only spot left uncleaned from Amy’s big OJ spill on the couch.  Poor Sage.

And finally a little berry action picture with a photoshop filter from this summer. Has some real nice colors in it.

Last but not least, probably going to uhaul some stuff up to Hancock house this Saturday coming up and finish the move last weekend in September.