This morning's key headlines from
GenerationalDynamics.com
- 'Lagarde list' scandal may put corrupt Greek politicians in jail
- Syrian refugees in Jordan face increasing hostility
- Millions of South Carolina residents at risk of identity theft
'Lagarde list' scandal may put corrupt Greek politicians in jail
Costas Vaxevanis, leaving court in Athens on Monday (Reuters)
As Europe's economy continues to circle the drain in a deflationary
spiral, here's a bizarre story that might end up sending corrupt Greek
banksters and politicians to jail. Christine Lagarde is currently the
head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but in 2010 she was the
finance minister of France. At that time, she obtained a thumb drive
containing the names of 2,059 Greeks with bank accounts in HSBC's bank
in Switzerland, and gave the thumb drive to Greek government
officials, so that they could be investigated for using the Swiss bank
accounts to evade taxes.
Well, Greek officials never did anything with the list, and at times
claimed that it had been lost or misplaced. Finally, the list fell
into the hands of Costas Vaxevanis, editor of the "Hot Doc" weekly
magazine, and he published the list. But instead of investigating the
2,000 for possible tax evasion, furious government officials
brought criminal charges against Vaxevanis for invasion of privacy,
and threatened with two years in jail.
Vaxevanis might well have gone to jail, but the case got international
attention, and infuriated ordinary Greeks who said that the
politicians were prosecuting him because they were embarrassed. On
Thursday, the court declared Vaxevanis to be innocent, but that's not
the end of the scandal over Lagarde's list. There are many prominent
politicians and businessmen on the list, and they are going to be
targeted by the far left as causing Greece's problems, just as the far
right blames Greece's problems on illegal immigrants. Al-Jazeera and Telegraph
Syrian refugees in Jordan face increasing hostility
There are 200,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, 30,000 of them in the
Zaatari Refugee Camp. The Syrians say that the camp has become
essentially a prison camp, where they're fed dirty food and are
treated "worse than animals." As a result, some Syrians are opting to
return to Syria. According to one, "We face a slow death here, or a
fast death over there."
BBC
Millions of South Carolina residents at risk of identity theft
A cyber attack of "foreign origin" on South Carolina's Department of
Revenue taxpayer data base has permitted 3.6 million social security
numbers and 387,000 credit cards numbers to be stolen. In addition,
data from 657,000 businesses has also been compromised. The breach
occurred on August 27, but was not discovered until weeks later, on
October 10, and only made public a couple of days ago. Governor Nikki
Haley has abandoned political campaigning to give full attention to
the breach. The state has since teamed up with Dun & Bradstreet to
provide free fraud and identity theft monitoring. However, residents
have to sign up to get the free services. If you're a South Carolina
taxpayer, you should do so immediately.
ZDNet
Although the attack is still under investigation, it appears that the
breach was accomplished through a fairly common "sql code injection"
attack. However, information so far indicates that the data base was
set up in a fairly shoddy manner, with little attention given to
security. For example, 3.6 million social security numbers and
387,000 credit card numbers were stolen. THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN
ENCRYPTED, so that they would be useless to an attacker who stole
them. In the last ten years, I've found that a lot of younger Gen-X
programmers have little regard for security, and I've even seen cases
where they've actually removed security control because they thought
that all Boomers who advocate security controls are full of crap.
This is a major problem in the computer industry, and we're going to
see a lot more disasters like the one in South Carolina. Dark Reading
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