Taliban Prisoners Escape During Well Planned Prison Attack

Attack on Afghanistan prison helps an estimated 1,100 prisoners escape, 390 of which were Taliban members.

The attack was carried out by 30 Taliban Militants and used rockets, bombs and two suicide bombers to attack the prison which was allegedly planned for two months and well executed.

According to spokesman Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco. He conceded that the assault was a success. "We admit it," Branco said. "Their guys did the job properly in that sense, but it does not have a strategic impact. We should not draw any conclusion about the deterioration of the military operations in the area. We should not draw any conclusion about the strength of the Taliban."

NATO, and Afghan security forces are currently looking for the escaped prisoners.

AP Video and Report of Afghan Prison Escape Aftermath

Source 1
Source 2

China Stealing Secrets and Accessing U.S. Lawmaker Computers

In response to trusted United States lawmakers Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, China says it is incapable of launching such an attack.

Not only is this absurd, but China has a long history of being caught with their hand in the cookie jar, most notably during the Clinton administration in the past.

The allegations are the latest in a series of cyber security problems blamed on China. Reports last year cited officials in Germany, the United States and Britain as saying government and military networks had been broken into by hackers backed by the Chinese military.

The Pentagon acknowledged last month at a closed House Intelligence committee meeting that its vast computer network is scanned or attacked by outsiders more than 300 million times each day. Most of these attacks have been said to come from China, or Chinese sources.

The real question to be asking here is, are we currently fighting an unconventional war with China? If not perhaps we should be taking proactive steps to protect ourselves.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

Tornado Occurances Highest In 40 Years

Though I have written several posts here in the last few months about Tornado Preparedness and safety, and Warning Signs of an Approaching Tornado, I feel it is important to once again create another post about this topic.

Though some who follow this blog closely may be asking why, once you have some of the facts you will see how important this is.

For instance so far this year there have been 116 deaths related to tornadoes, the highest in almost twenty years. There have been 1520 reported tornadoes this year the highest number in almost 40 years. To put this in perspective, last year there was 1085 total tornadoes, in 2006 there were 1106 tornadoes, and in 2005 there were 1264 tornadoes.

Unfortunately tornadoes have been hitting more heavily populated areas this year as well.

In the last 24 hours tornadoes have touched down in Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota. In Iowa, a tornado stuck and devastated a local Boy Scout camp where 4 young boys died and 48 were injured. Ironically the Boy Scouts had tornado safety training the day before.

In Kansas, two persons were killed and the tornado caused an estimated $20 million USD in damage. The university's Wind Erosion Laboratory was destroyed and a building the housed a nuclear reactor was also damaged. Though the reactor was left undamaged.

Source 1
Source 2

Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)

Colorado Train Derailment No Accident

A train derailment in Westminster, Colorado seems to have been deliberate according to local police and other officials.

The derailment which occured on Monday was deemed a deliberate act after local police received a call about a stump on the tracks. A police officer responded and removed the stump, however someone placed it back on the tracks prior to the train coming through.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, which owns the line is place a reward of $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for sabotaging the tracks. BNSF asks anyone who has information to call toll-free 1-800-832-5452.

The train was carrying lumber and building materials, had the train been carrying chemicals it could have been worse. The derailment caused four locomotives and 16 cars of the 37 to come off the tracks.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

Amazon Outage Continues

Amazon.com was down again on Monday for a while, and is down as of this writing as well.

Estimates are Amazon.com is losing about $30,000 USD per minute with its site being unreachable by the millions who use the site each day to make purchases.

Also affected are Bloggers who rely on Amazon.com as a revenue stream. Ironically I myself used an Amazon link this past week which is currently not working. Though, this is not my main priority I am sure it is affecting other bloggers out there.

In addition it will most likely have a negative impact on Amazon's revenues for the quarter as well.

The Register has a story saying that bots are to blame for the outage which may well be possible, at this point it seems like a DDOS attack on them and some of their other sites in both the U.S. and UK. In any case Amazon so far seems fairly tight lipped about what the actual cause is.

The Register also had this to say "Whatever the cause, the outage comes as a pox on the house of Amazon. In addition to being the world's biggest online retailer, it's also trying to convince smaller companies to outsource their mission-critical storage, server and database operations to its Amazon Web Services."

In the world of business continuity, giving your small company critical systems to a large wouldbe target just does not make sense. There are much better solutions out there.

I'll keep you up to date on the issue as I am curious as how this will play out.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3