[Saleh]

168 Feared Dead After Plane Crashes in Iran

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Originally Posted by NYTimes

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A passenger plane bound for Armenia from Iran crashed Wednesday morning in northwest Iran, and all 168 people aboard were believed to have perished, Iranian state media reported.

The plane, made by the Russian company Tupolev, crashed near the city of Qazvin at about 11:30 a.m. local time after leaving Tehran on a flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Hussein Behzadpour, the police chief of Qazvin, said in comments quoted by Iran’s English language Press TV.

The crash site was near Jannatabad, a village just outside Qazvin, Mr. Behzadpour said.

The spokesman for Iran’s Aviation Organization, Reza Jafarzadeh, told Press TV that the plane, Caspian Airlines Flight 7908, crashed 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport. Qazvin is about 90 miles northwest of Tehran.

The plane was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members, state television reported. The broadcast showed wreckage mingled with human body parts, and a fire brigade official was quoted as saying the debris was strewn over a broad area.

Among the images was a crater gouged into farmland with mangled pieces of metal scattered about, Reuters reported.

News reports said the pilot may have been trying an emergency landing after technical problems occurred.

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Cyberattack Probe Goes Global

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Originally Posted by CSO

British authorities have launched an investigation into the recent cyberattacks that crippled Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, as the trail to find the perpetrators stretches around the world.

On Tuesday, the Vietnamese security vendor Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (Bkis) said it had identified a master command-and-control server used to coordinate the denial-of-service attacks, which took down major U.S. and South Korean government Web sites.

A command-and-control server is used to distribute instructions to zombie PCs, which form a botnet that can be used to bombard Web sites with traffic, rendering the sites useless. The server was on an IP (Internet Protocol) address used by Global Digital Broadcast, an IP TV technology company based in Brighton, England, according to Bkis.

That master server distributed instructions to eight other command-and-control servers used in the attacks. Bkis, which managed to gain control of two of the eight servers, said that 166,908 hacked computers in 74 countries were used in the attacks and were programmed to get new instructions every three minutes.

But the master server isn't in the U.K.; it's in Miami, according to Tim Wray, one of the owners of Digital Global Broadcast, who spoke to IDG News Service on Tuesday evening, London time.

The server belongs to Digital Latin America (DLA), which is one of Digital Global Broadcast's partners. DLA encodes Latin American programming for distribution over IP TV-compatible devices, such as set-top boxes.

New programs are taken from satellite and encoded into the proper format, then sent over VPN (Virtual Private Network) to the U.K., where Digital Global Broadcast distributes the content, Wray said. The VPN connection made it appear the master server belonged to Digital Global Broadcast when it actually is in DLA's Miami data center.

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