Courtesy The Washington Post:

 

Hackers on Tuesday hijacked the Web site CheckFree.com, one of the largest online bill payment companies, redirecting an unknown number of visitors to a Web address that tried to install malicious software on visitors’ computers, the company said today.

The attack, first reported by The Register, a security news Web site, began in the early morning hours of Dec. 2, when Checkfree’s home page and the customer login page were redirected to a server in the Ukraine.

CheckFree spokeswoman Melanie Tolley said users who visited the sites during the attack would have been redirected to a blank page that tried to install malware. Tolley added that CheckFree regained control over its site by 5 a.m. on Dec. 2. The company said it was still having the malware analyzed by experts.

“The degree of exposure to users is dependent on how current their anti-virus software is and what browser they used to connect with,” Tolley said, adding that the company will release more information about the attack as it becomes available.

But Paul Ferguson, a threat researcher with anti-virus firm Trend Micro, said Trend’s analysis of the malware indicates that it is a new strain of Trojan horse program designed to steal user names and passwords.

It appears hackers were able to hijack the company’s Web sites by stealing the user name and password needed to make account changes at the Web site of Network Solutions, CheckFree’s domain registrar.Susan Wade, a spokeswoman for the Herndon, Va., based registrar, said that at around 12:30 a.m. Dec. 2, someone logged in using the company’s credentials and changed the address of CheckFree’s authoritative domain name system (DNS) servers to point CheckFree site visitors to the Internet address in the Ukraine. DNS servers serve as a kind of phone book for Internet traffic, translating human-friendly Web site names into numeric Internet addresses that are easier for computers to handle.

 

-Article Continues with list of all companies affected @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy New York Daily News (NYLocal)

A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Islandstore Friday morning, police and witnesses said.

The 34-year-old employee, a temporary maintenance worker, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after theValley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

CAUGHT ON CAMERA: WAL-MART CROWD MOMENTS BEFORE DEADLY STAMPEDE

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too…I literally had to fight people off my back.”

The unidentified victim was rushed to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., police said.

The cause of death wasn’t immediately available pending results of an autopsy.

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was knocked to the floor during the mad rush. She was hospitalized for observation, police said. Early witness accounts that the woman suffered a miscarriage were unfounded, police said.

Three other shoppers suffered minor injuries, cops said.

-Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy MSNBC:

The financial crisis that has been sweeping the globe has reshaped nearly every corner of the economy, but no industry has been altered more radically than banking.

Several of the nation’s biggest banks have failed or been absorbed by healthier institutions, leaving three giant “superbanks” with an unprecedented concentration of market power: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

While that may be good news for emerging giants and the failing companies they helped rescue, the new oligopoly raises troubling questions about regulation and competition, analysts and consumer advocates say.

 

“Bank fees are going up, up, up, and that’s the danger to consumers as more of these banks consolidate,” says Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumer League. “It’s difficult for the average person to get a bank account that doesn’t involve fees, and if you get into financial distress you’re cooked, and you’ll be ‘fee-ed’ to death.”

According to a recently released banking fee study from Bankrate.com, ATM surcharges rose 11 percent this year to an average of $1.97, and the fee for a bounced checks rose 2.5 percent to an average $28.95.

“Consumers are going to be victims of higher and more punitive fees,” Greenberg predicts.

Moreover, many analysts worry about how federal and state authorities, who were unable to prevent the current financial industry meltdown, will be able to monitor the new giant banks that combine a wide range of operations from investment banking to consumer lending. 

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

From The Dough Roller:

While the $700 billion bailout and presidential election have dominated the news, the U.S. House passed a major piece of credit card reform legislation. The Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2008 passed the House on Sept. 23 by a vote of 312-112 (with nine members not voting).

The bill, which still needs to pass the Senate before heading to the White House, would have a major impact on everything from how credit card issuers apply cardholder payments to outstanding debt to limits on interest rate increases.

Here are some of the more significant provisions of the act:

Retroactive interest rate increases and universal default limits. One of the biggest complaints leveled against the credit card industry is the practice of raising interest rates significantly due to a late payment or other default, or sometimes for no reason at all. The Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights would limit a card issuer’s ability to raise interest rates. Specifically, a credit card company could not (with some exceptions) raise interest rates on existing balances. Furthermore, if the interest rate on future balances was raised, the credit card issuer would be limited in how quickly it could insist that the old balance subject to the lower interest rate is paid off.

Here are some other interest rate-hike protections the act would provide:

If a cardholder loses the benefit of an introductory rate, the new rate could not exceed what the interest rate would have been at the expiration of the introductory period.

A consumer must be given a 45-day written notice before higher interest rates take effect.

Article Continues with Links @ sourced Site.

NEW YORK (AP) — The credit markets finally got a bailout bill, but the stranglehold hasn’t let up — a troubling sign that lenders and investors believe the package will only be a baby step in the long road to economic recovery.

The credit markets, where companies go to get cash loans, have seized up since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and in anticipation of the $700 billion plan initially voted down by the House. The House passed a revised version of it Friday following the Senate’s approval earlier this week, but anxiety about its effectiveness kept demand for Treasury bills high and nearly nonexistent for other types of debt.

Overall, market participants have begun regarding the rescue plan as a medicine for what’s ailing the financial system, but not a cure-all.

“At best, we can hope that it stems some of the more intense risk from the credit crisis. It prevents things from spiraling out of hand here,” said JPMorgan Chase economist Michael Feroli.

Some are worried, though, that the plan will not work at all.

“Nobody knows how it’s going to succeed,” said Howard Simons, strategist with Bianco Research in Chicago. “It seems the American public had better sense than Wall Street and Washington — the American public said, don’t throw good money after bad.”

The Treasury will buy banks’ risky mortgage-backed assets in an effort to alleviate investors’ worries about the institutions’ solvency and free them up to do more lending. Even if those efforts succeed, the effects will be far from instantaneous, and borrowing could remain very expensive for some time. With the economy in such a weak state, lending to consumers and businesses will still appear risky until certain factors — particularly employment and the housing market — improve.

The Labor Department said employers cut payrolls by 159,000 in September, the largest loss in more than five years, while unemployment remained at 6.1 percent.

Layoffs are likely to keep piling up if it remains tough to find credit. Spectrum Yarns Inc., a North Carolina textile company, said it closed two plants and laid off 200 workers this week because it got turned down by a North Carolina bank, a New York finance company, and several private lenders.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Editorial Comment: In the interest of full disclosure, WaMu is this poster’s current financial institution. Remember folks, its just business, nothing personal….My Hairy postarier it ain’t Personal!!!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Talks on a $700 billion rescue for the U.S. financial system fell into chaos on Thursday amid accusations Republican presidential candidate John McCain scuppered the deal, and U.S. authorities closed Washington Mutual and sold its assets in America’s biggest ever bank failure.

As negotiations over an unprecedented billion bailout plan to restore credit markets degenerated into chaos, the largest U.S. savings and loan bank was taken over by authorities and its deposits auctioned off. U.S. stock futures fell by more than 1 percent, the dollar weakened and share markets in Asia fell.

The third-largest U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase & Co said it bought the deposits of Washington Mutual Inc, which has seen its stock price virtually wiped out because of massive amounts of bad mortgages. The government said there would be no impact on WaMu’s depositors and customers. JPMorgan said it would be business as usual on Friday morning.

Had a bailout deal been reached in Congress, it may have helped the savings and loan, founded in Seattle in 1889. Efforts to find a suitor to buy WaMu faltered in recent days over concerns about whether the government would reach a deal to buy its toxic mortgages.

Earlier on Thursday, U.S. lawmakers had appeared close to a final agreement on the bailout, lifting world stock markets and sending the dollar higher. But an emergency White House meeting between Congressional leaders with U.S. President George W. Bush “devolved into a contentious shouting match,” according to a statement from the McCain campaign.

In advance of that meeting, which included the two men battling to succeed him, Democrat Barack Obama and McCain, a compromise bipartisan deal seemed imminent.

After the session, Congressional leaders said an agreement could take until the weekend or longer.

Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, who has played a key role in talks over the Bush administration proposal, said negotiations would continue on Friday, but with no sign that House Republicans would take part.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — Fearing a financial crisis worldwide, the Federal Reserve reversed course on Tuesday and agreed to an $85 billion bailout that would give the government control of the troubled insurance giant American International Group.

The decision, only two weeks after the Treasury took over the federally chartered mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank’s history.

With time running out after A.I.G. failed to get a bank loan to avoid bankruptcy, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, convened a meeting with House and Senate leaders on Capitol Hill about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday to explain the rescue plan. They emerged just after 7:30 p.m. with Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke looking grim, but with top lawmakers initially expressing support for the plan. But the bailout is likely to prove controversial, because it effectively puts taxpayer money at risk while protecting bad investments made by A.I.G. and other institutions it does business with.

What frightened Fed and Treasury officials was not simply the prospect of another giant corporate bankruptcy, but A.I.G.’s role as an enormous provider of esoteric financial insurance contracts to investors who bought complex debt securities. They effectively required A.I.G. to cover losses suffered by the buyers in the event the securities defaulted. It meant A.I.G. was potentially on the hook for billions of dollars’ worth of risky securities that were once considered safe.

If A.I.G. had collapsed — and been unable to pay all of its insurance claims — institutional investors around the world would have been instantly forced to reappraise the value of those securities, and that in turn would have reduced their own capital and the value of their own debt. Small investors, including anyone who owned money market funds with A.I.G. securities, could have been hurt, too. And some insurance policy holders were worried, even though they have some protections.

“It would have been a chain reaction,” said Uwe Reinhardt, a professor of economics at Princeton University. “The spillover effects could have been incredible.”

Financial markets, which on Monday had plunged over worries about A.I.G.’s possible collapse and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, reacted with relief to the news of the bailout. In anticipation of a deal, stocks rose about 1 percent in the United States on Tuesday. Asian stock markets opened with strong gains on Wednesday morning, but the rally lost steam as worries returned about the extent of harm to the global financial system.

Still, the move will likely start an intense political debate during the presidential election campaign over who is to blame for the financial crisis that prompted the rescue.

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke had not requested any new legislative authority for the bailout at Tuesday night’s meeting. “The secretary and the chairman of the Fed, two Bush appointees, came down here and said, ‘We’re from the government, we’re here to help them,’ ” Mr. Frank said. “I mean this is one more affirmation that the lack of regulation has caused serious problems. That the private market screwed itself up and they need the government to come help them unscrew it.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly criticized the rescue, calling the $85 billion a “staggering sum.” Ms. Pelosi said the bailout was “just too enormous for the American people to guarantee.” Her comments suggested that the Bush administration and the Fed would face sharp questioning in Congressional hearings. President Bush was briefed earlier in the afternoon.

A major concern is that the A.I.G. rescue won’t be the last. At Tuesday night’s meeting. lawmakers asked if there was any way of knowing if this would be the final major government intervention. Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson said there was not. Indeed, the markets remain worried about the financial condition of major regional banks as well as that of Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest thrift.

Article Continues with Links @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy The Huntsville Times

MONTGOMERY – With Hurricane Ike pushing gas prices above $5 today, Gov. Bob Riley late this afternoon declared a state of emergency for Alabama, triggering a price-gouging law.

Riley cited the U.S. Department of Energy’s prediction that gasoline and other energy shortages will likely occur in Alabama because of Hurricane Ike.

The state law that prohibits “unconscionable pricing” of items for sale or rent takes effect when the governor has declared a state of emergency.

Earlier in the day, the governor’s office noted that an Alabama governor’s ability to declare a state of emergency was very limited.

By law, an Alabama governor cannot declare a state of emergency unless there has been or there is anticipated to be an attack on the United States, a natural disaster of major proportions affecting Alabama or a public health emergency.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy ars technica:

Comcast has announced that it will in fact be introducing bandwidth caps to all residential customers. The cap, which will go into effect as of October 1, will be 250GB per month. Comcast justifies the decision by saying that it’s “an extremely large amount of data,” and that a very large majority of customers will never cross it.

In fact, according to Comcast, this is actually the same policy that is already in place, except with more explicit numbers as to what is allowed and what isn’t. “As part of our preexisting policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,” the company said in a statement sent to Ars. “If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use.”

This announcement has been widely expected since at least May of this year, after the whole brouhaha went down with P2P throttling and the FCC fallout. Comcast had originally argued that that the FCC had no authority to block Comcast’s process, but ultimately decided on its own to stop interfering with P2P traffic. The company also joined in with other ISPs in trying to devise a P2P user’s bill of rights and contemplated the use of P4P software.

Comcast customers that make heavy use of their Internet connections—myself included—are sure to find themselves somewhat alarmed at the prospect of being capped. After all, perfectly legal things like movies from iTunes and Netflix, online music stores, massive software updates, and other media-heavy applications do suck up a lot of bandwidth. Comcast insists that the 250GB cap is enough to send some 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs, or download 125 standard-definition movies. Okay, so if a cap is going to be enforced, 250GB isn’t that bad. It beats the 60GB caps and lower caps seen elsewhere in North America and it’s a nice change from the company’s previous etherial and mysterious caps. Still, investing in the infrastructure necessary to alleviate the need for caps is a better option for everyone involved.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy The LATimes

f you are searching for signs that today’s high food prices won’t last, the latest report on the meat industry isn’t promising. In May, a distinguished panel of scientists and meat industry officials concluded that the current “factory farm” method for mass-producing meat poses so many threats to public health — from contaminated water supplies to deadly epidemics of E. coli E. coli — that the whole system needs to go. The good news: Even meat companies agree that change is unavoidable. The bad news: Replacing factory farms with something “sustainable” likely means an end to 50 years of falling meat prices.

The report, from a Pew Charitable Trusts commission, takes a hard look at “confined animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, which produce most of the U.S. meat supply. These massive facilities house tens of thousands of cattle, hogs and chickens and generate not just huge amounts of meat but rivers of sewage, clouds of contaminated dust and nearly a fifth of all greenhouse gases.

The crowded, often unsanitary conditions promote disease, which has led to the overuse of antibiotics and to a class of superbugs that are resistant to those same antibiotics. Even the modern corn-based livestock diet causes problems. It makes meat fattier and may have helped some strains of the E. coli bacteria evolve from benign microbe to one of the deadliest pathogens in the food supply. And, of course, to grow all the grain we now feed our livestock, we’ve converted much of the Midwest into a huge corn and soybean plantation.

The only solution, the report concludes, is to replace the giant factory farms with models such as “free-range” operations that give animals more space and use different methods of feeding, sewage disposal and medical treatment. And that’s where things get tricky, because most of the practices the industry is being asked to abandon have been pivotal in making meat cheap.

For example, grazing cattle on pasture grass would probably mean less disease and leaner meat, not to mention happier cows. But because the mega-farms confine livestock specifically to restrict animals from moving (and thus burning calories unnecessarily), and because corn is more calorie-dense than grass, CAFO-raised animals fatten faster and thus more cheaply.

Likewise, reducing antibiotics in meat production, though it may improve our health, will deprive the industry of the meat equivalent of Miracle Gro.

Because small, steady doses of antibiotics kill the low-grade infections that normally plague livestock, dosed animals spend fewer calories fighting infection and thus have more calories available for building muscle and bone. When fed antibiotics, livestock can grow 25% faster on the same intake of feed — a critical point, given that feed is a meat companies’ biggest cost.

Of course, we’ve long known that our meat miracle wasn’t quite a free lunch. Yet we were willing to overlook the negatives because CAFOs made meat so abundant and cheap. Since 1960, for example, U.S. poultry output has jumped sevenfold while the price per pound, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by two-thirds. Prices for beef and pork also have fallen precipitously. And as we exported CAFOs to other countries, the entire world began to benefit from falling meat prices and rising dietary standards.

But as the downsides of factory farming have grown too large to ignore, we’ve had to admit that our meat is cheap only because we don’t count all the costs: Taxpayers spend $4.1 billion cleaning up livestock sewage leaks and $2.5 billion treating salmonella. All told, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, CAFOs may be costing taxpayers $38 billion a year — costs that aren’t reflected in the retail price of meat.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.