Delincuentes cibernéticos están enviando correos electrónicos con noticias de un sitio falso de la BBC para llevar a los usuarios a páginas de alta peligrosidad.
A través de los mensajes explotan un defecto recientemente descubierto en el programa Explorer de Microsoft.
Si los usuarios hacen click en el vínculo recibido son automáticamente derivados a un sitio de internet engañoso que instala un software conocido como "keylogger" que puede monitorear la actividad financiera.
Es por eso que la advertencia para quienes reciben estos correos es que no hagan ingresen en el vínculo y simplemente lo borren.
La alerta, que fue hecha por la firma de seguridad digital Websense, se produjo a menos de una semana de que fueran detectadas las fallas del popular buscador.
Atacan "Mundial de Fútbol"
Precisamente la nueva amenaza se aprovecha de una de éstas falencias en el Explorer. 
"El programa 'keylogger' monitorea los movimientos que se producen en diferentes sitios financieros y descarga información estratégica para el atacante", señala la alerta de Websense.
Otros sitios pueden instalar programas como Spyware y Trojan Horses en computadores que no cuentan con las suficientes barreras de protección.
Según Mark Murtagh, director técnico de Websense, es una práctica común entre los hackers la utilización de marcas globales, como la BBC, para atraer a los lectores hacia sitios de internet peligrosos.
"El año pasado vimos una acción similar tras el huracán Katrina con falsos correos que pedían ayuda para la Cruz Roja".
"Y ya estamos viendo la marca del Mundial de Fútbol siendo utilizada de la misma manera", dijo Murtagh.
La lucha contra los "sitios piratas"
Pero esta no es la primera vez que la BBC ha sido utilizada por hackers. 
"Hay gente que ha creado parodias de nuestra página", dijo Steve Herrmann, editor del sitio de noticias de la BBC.
"Pero nos preocupa seriamente que utilicen el sitio para atacar la seguridad de la gente".
Las firmas de seguridad plantean que cientos de vínculos son enviados para arrastrar a la gente hacia sitios fraudulentos.
En el blog sobre seguridad de Microsoft, la compañía indica que ha trabajado para que se aplique la ley y éstos sitios engañosos sean derrotados.
Microsoft anunció que producirá soluciones que permitan cerrar las zonas vulnerables de su programa a partir del próximo 11 de abril.
Sin embargo, el lanzamiento podría adelantarse si la amenaza crece significativamente.
Por ahora dos firmas, eEye Digital Security y Determina, han producido en forma independiente programas que protegen a los usuarios.
Michelle Obama Looks for a New Introduction
Michelle Obama’s eyes flicker tentatively even as she offers a trained smile. As her campaign plane arcs over the Flathead Range in Montana, she is asked to consider her complicated public image.
Conservative columnists accuse her of being unpatriotic and say she simmers with undigested racial anger. A blogger who supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton circulates unfounded claims that Mrs. Obama gave an accusatory speech in her church about the sins of “whitey.” Mrs. Obama shakes her head.
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“You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be,” she says in an interview. Referring to a character in a 1970s sitcom, she adds: “I mean, ‘whitey’? That’s something that George Jefferson would say. Anyone who says that doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived. They don’t know anything about me.”
Now her husband’s presidential campaign is giving her image a subtle makeover, with a new speech in the works to emphasize her humble roots and a tough new chief of staff. On Wednesday, Mrs. Obama will do a guest turn on “The View,” the daytime talk show on ABC, with an eye toward softening her reputation.
Her problems seemed hard to imagine last fall and winter. Mrs. Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, appeared so at ease with the tactile business of campaigning and drew praise for humanizing, often with humor, a husband who could seem elusive.
Then came some rhetorical stumbles. In Madison, Wis., in February, she told voters that hope was sweeping America, adding, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” Cable news programs replayed those 15 words in an endless loop of outrage.
Barack Obama often blurs identity lines; much of his candidacy has seemed almost post-racial. Mrs. Obama’s identity is less mutable. She is a descendant of slaves and a product of Chicago’s historically black South Side. She burns hot where he banks cool, and that too can make her an inviting proxy for attack.
Fox News called her “Obama’s baby mama,” a derogatory term for an unwed mother. Christopher Hitchens, a Slate columnist, claimed — with scant evidence — that her college thesis proved she was once influenced by black separatism. National Review presented her as a scowling “Mrs. Grievance.”
The caricatures of Mrs. Obama as the Angry Black Woman confound her, friends say. Her own family crosses racial boundaries — her mother-in-law and a sister-in-law are white — and she has spent much of her adult life trying to address racial resentment.
In her freshman year at Princeton, a white roommate’s mother agitated for her daughter to swap rooms. Mrs. Obama was among a handful of blacks at a prestigious Chicago law firm. As a hospital executive, she navigated the often tense line between a predominantly white-run institution and a suspicious black community.
But the 44-year-old woman known even to friends as The Taskmaster sometimes speaks with a passion unusual for a potential first lady. She tells voters that “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual — uninvolved, uninformed.”
She says she intends to evoke a John F. Kennedy-like idealism and highlight her own journey, but in her commanding cadences, some people — and not just conservatives — hear a lecture.
Before her husband announced his candidacy, Mrs. Obama confided in friends: Barack and I will cut an unfamiliar figure to most of America.
“It’s such uncharted waters,” said Verna Williams, a Harvard classmate and friend. “In a sound-bite era, where you have to come with a quick and dirty take, she doesn’t fit what it means to be an African-American woman.”
Michelle Robinson grew up in the black half of a divided Chicago. She and her brother, Craig, lived with their parents on the second floor of a bungalow. “Two bedrooms, if you want to be generous,” she says.
Her father, Frasier Robinson, was a pump operator for Chicago’s water department and a precinct captain in the Democratic machine. Her mother, Marian, brought workbooks home to keep her children ahead of their classes. The working-class neighborhood was filled with uncles and grandparents, block associations and oak trees. “We knew the gang-bangers — my brother played basketball in the park,” Mrs. Obama says. “Home never feels dangerous.”
In 1981, she left for Princeton, an overwhelmingly white institution that cherished its genteel traditions. She was one of 94 black freshmen in a class of over 1,100. Catherine Donnelly, a white student from New Orleans, was a roommate. Her mother spent months pleading with Princeton officials to give her daughter a white roommate instead. “Mom just blew a gasket when I described Michelle,” Ms. Donnelly recalled. “It was my secret shame.”Mrs. Obama shrugs now. Some classmates resented blacks; some resented affirmative action. “Diversity can’t be taken care of with 10 kids,” she says. “There is an isolation that comes with that.”
Her brother, two years older, was a star basketball player at Princeton, but he felt similarly. “If you’re young and black and from the South Side, there are always going to be people who feel you should not be there,” Craig Robinson said. “You build up a thick skin.”
Black and white students rarely socialized. When Crystal Nix Hines became the first black editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, some black students wondered why she wanted to run a “white” newspaper. Mrs. Obama, however, was thrilled that a historic barrier had fallen.
That did not stop her, however, from confronting Ms. Hines, a friend, over an article that contained what Mrs. Obama took to be inappropriate characterizations of a black politician. “ ‘You need to make sure that a story like that doesn’t run again,’ ” Ms. Hines recalls her friend saying with utter calm.
Sociology became her lens to examine her anxieties about race. Mrs. Obama spent hours in the office of Professor Marvin Bressler. “She was troubled by the questions that troubled every student in that situation,” he said. “They all walk around saying, ‘Who am I?’ ”
In her senior thesis, she asked: Does immersion in an elite white institution draw blacks away from their community? She surveyed black Princeton alumni, finding their ties weakened after graduation.
“The path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton,” Mrs. Obama wrote in the introduction, “will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society, never becoming a full participant.”
Mitchell Duneier, a sociology professor at Princeton who reviews undergraduate theses, noted that Mrs. Obama rejected some of her own theories. “Her senior thesis is being misread as if it is a polemical essay about her alienation,” Professor Duneier said.
Epiphany Leads to Home
Michelle Obama recalls gazing out the window of her plush 47th-floor office in downtown Chicago and realizing that she could barely see, literally or metaphorically, her beloved South Side.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, Mrs. Obama took a job at what is now Sidley Austin, a corporate law firm. She had a handsome salary and the prospect of better to come.
Then a close friend from college died. So did her father, who had long suffered from multiple sclerosis; Michelle so adored him that she would curl up in his lap even as an adult.
“I looked out at my neighborhood and sort of had an epiphany that I had to bring my skills to bear in the place that made me,” she says in the interview. “I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money.”
Eventually, she started the Chicago chapter of a training program called Public Allies. One day, looking for young leaders, she might knock on doors at Cabrini-Green, a public housing project so violent and neglected it would later be mostly demolished. Another day, she discovered Jose A. Rico, a young Mexican so alienated that he insisted on remaining an illegal immigrant rather than pursue citizenship. What is your goal? he recalled her asking.
To open a high school for Latinos, he replied. Mrs. Obama nodded: Good, tell me exactly how you would do it.
“Michelle was tough, man; she let nothing slide,” said Mr. Rico, now principal of Multicultural Arts High School in Chicago, which he helped start.
She preached the gospel of the second and third chance, insisting that the white youth from Swarthmore work alongside the former gang member.
Bush Calls for End to Ban on Offshore Oil Drilling
WASHINGTON — President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to end a federal ban on offshore oil drilling and open a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration, asserting that those steps and others would lower gasoline prices and “strengthen our national security.”
In recent years, the president said, “scientists have developed innovative techniques to reach Anwar’s oil with virtually no impact on the land or local wildlife,” referring to the wildlife refuge by its acronym. He continued, “I urge members of Congress to allow this remote region to bring enormous benefits to the American people.”
President Bush also urged Congress to approve the extraction of oil from shale on federal lands, something he said can be done far more economically now than a few years ago, and to speed the approval process for building new refineries.
Mr. Bush sought to take full political advantage of soaring fuel prices by portraying Republican lawmakers as imaginative and forward-looking and the Democratic majority in Congress as obstructionists on energy policy.
“I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past,” Mr. Bush said. “Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions. If Congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act.”
The president’s move to end the ban on offshore drilling reverses his longstanding position on the issue. Together with the other proposals he laid out on Wednesday, it underscores how $4-a-gallon gas has become a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. A growing number of Republicans are lining up in opposition to the federal ban.
The party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, used a speech in Houston on Tuesday to say he now favors offshore drilling, an announcement that infuriated environmentalists who had long viewed him as an ally. Florida’s Republican governor, Charlie Crist, immediately joined Mr. McCain, saying that he, too, now wants an end to the ban.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, reacted quickly to the president’s remarks on Wednesday. “This week’s flip-flop on offshore oil drilling by President Bush and Senator John McCain is nothing more than a cynical campaign ploy that will do nothing to lower energy prices, and represents another big giveaway to oil companies already making billions in profits,” Mr. Reid said in a statement.
On Tuesday, before Mr. Bush’s decision became known, the drilling issue was already causing a heated back-and-forth on the campaign trail. Mr. McCain sought to straddle the divide between environmentalists and the energy industry, while facing accusations from his Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama, that he had capitulated to the oil industry.
Mr. Bush has said for years that he favors opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and in 2006 he signed into law a bill that expanded exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. But the topic of coastal drilling elsewhere has been an extremely sensitive one in the Bush family; Mr. Bush’s father signed a presidential executive order in 1990 banning coastal oil exploration, and Mr. Bush’s brother Jeb was an outspoken opponent of offshore drilling when he was governor of Florida.
Now, though, President Bush is considering retracting his father’s order. Although the chief White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Mr. Bush “is not taking any executive action” on Wednesday, two people outside the White House said such a move was under serious consideration, and a senior White House official did not dispute their account.
“This is a strong point of discussion inside the White House,” said Representative John E. Peterson, a Pennsylvania Republican who has been asking Mr. Bush for years to rescind his father’s action. Mr. Peterson is also leading an effort in Congress to repeal its ban.
Offshore drilling is blocked by two bans, one imposed by Congress and the other by the first President Bush’s executive order. Asked why the current President Bush did not act at once to lift the order imposed by his father, Keith Hennessey, the director of the president’s economic council, told The Associated Press, “He thinks that probably the most productive way to work with this Congress is to try to do it in tandem.”
But the Institute for Energy Research, a nonprofit research organization that promotes “free-market energy and environmental policy,” has called for Mr. Bush to rescind the executive order and chided him on Wednesday for not doing so. “The president has chosen to speak softly when American consumers need him to wield a big stick,” the group’s president, Thomas J. Pyle, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This was a missed opportunity.”
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