Europe police smash 'perfectly structured' Georgian crime ring

--------


This undated handout picture released by the Spanish Police shows suspects Kvicha P. (L) and Kakhaber S. (R)

Police from six European countries arrested at least 69 people on Monday in a swoop on a "perfectly structured" Georgian criminal gang which stole and trafficked goods around the continent.

Most of the arrests were in Spain -- the gang's nerve centre -- as well as Germany and Austria, but suspects were also picked up in Switzerland, Italy and France, a Spanish judicial official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The suspects, who led deliberately low-key lives while allegedly coordinating crime, were held on suspicion of drugs and weapons trafficking, money laundering, extortion and conspiracy to murder, the source said.

The judicial official said 24 of those held were arrested in Spain, most of them in Barcelona and Valencia, while Swiss authorities said they had arrested 11.

"The arrest of the criminal organisation's heads deals a harsh blow to Georgian criminality in Europe," said a statement from the Swiss prosecutor's office, adding that 120 Swiss police had been involved in the operation.

Swiss authorities began investigations in April 2009, the prosecutor said, of "certain people of east European origin, mainly Georgians and Russians."

"A perfectly structured and extremely hierarchic international criminal organisation, controlled from Spain and mainly active in theft, burglary and handling stolen goods operated in several European nations notably Switzerland," it said.

The Swiss network was made up of an overall boss, and four deputies who divided the country between them, supervising crimes committed by "affiliates," prosecutors said.

Police and prosecutors from Austria, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland cooperated for months ahead of Monday's swoop, the Swiss federal prosecutor (MPC) said.

"The operation's ultimate aim was to target the overall criminal organisation, its structure, functioning, financing and codes of conduct, with the aim of dismantling it, beyond national frontiers," the MPC said.

Suspects arrested in Spain were employed by the Georgian mafia after arriving in the country, where they led quiet lives, avoiding conspicuous displays of wealth, the source said.

Three suspects were arrested in France, near Paris, as part of the operation and accused of theft and receiving stolen goods, police said.

In Austrian, police nabbed two Georgian mafia bosses during raids and seized stolen computers and jewels, federal police told Austrian news agency APA.

The crackdown was coordinated at a European level by anti-corruption prosecutors in Spain, who described it as a "major" operation, the judicial source said.

The operation is the third in Spain against organised crime gangs from eastern Europe.

Operation Avispa in 2005 and 2006 led to the arrests of 28 Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Spaniards.

In Operation Troika in 2008, Spanish police broke up an organised crime network based in the Russian city of St Petersburg, arresting 20 people.

Police described that gang, the Tambovskaya-Malyshevskaya, as "one of the four biggest in the world".

Executed in broad daylight: The chilling moment a Mafia hitman strikes outside a Naples bar... but no-one saw a thing

* WARNING: The story contains graphic images

This is the chilling moment a Mafia boss is gunned down by a hitman outside a bar.

Mario Bacio Terracino is first felled by a gunshot to the arm.

His attacker then stands over him and finishes him off with a single shot to the back of the head before strolling away.

Police in Naples, where the local Mafia are known as the Camorra, released the CCTV footage to try to catch the hitman.

They believe the killing of Terracino, 53, was part of a feud with a rival gang over the control of lucrative drug trafficking network.

Terracino was also known to police as a bank robber and was accused of a £1.8 million heist committed in 1991, but was never convicted.

His trademark was said to be entering buildings from below through the sewer network.

Police in Naples also revealed that Terracino had also been part of a Camorra gang that had kidnapped Italian Socialist politician Guido De Martino in 1977.

He was snatched of a street in Naples and held for six weeks before being freed after a one billion lire ransom was paid - £430.000.

Tarracino is seen smoking a cigarette outside a bar in the central Sanita neighborhood. The killer enters the bar, where there are at least six people, then emerges and shoots Tarracino at point blank range.

When Tarracino falls on the ground, the killer finishes him off with a bullet to the head.

None of the bystanders moves a finger, although it is hard to say if that is from genuine indifference or fear of retaliation.

A woman is seen rubbing off her scratch-and-win lottery card as Tarracino is killed in front of her. A cigarette-seller moves his stall a few meters down the road, while a man holding a toddler in his arms looks at the victim and walks away.

A woman counting change in her purse jumps in shock at the sound of the gunshot and turns to see the killer calmly walking away. He was even said to be smiling.

Today, police in Naples said: 'We are taking the unusal step of releasing this graphic footage in an attempt to catch his killer.

'His face although hidden is visible and someone out there must recognise him and we would appeal for them to come forward.'

So far this year, there have been more than 30 Camorra murders in Naples, many of which remain unsolved and many of them stem from feuds between rival clans.

In an attempt to control the extent of organised crime in the city the Italian government has flooded the area with troops, but with little effect.

One of the bloodiest hits was last September, when six Africans who tried to muscle into the drugs trade were shot dead outside a shop.

The Camorra is much more violent than the Sicilian Mafia and also has several branches in Britain. In 2006, Naples mobster Raffaele Caldarelli was arrested in Hackney, east London.
----------
RELATED POSTS:-

• Inside Michael Jackson's trial -Documentary about MJ innocent
• Girl, 15, gang raped outside school dance while witnesses film horror attack
• Affidavit: Mom told deputies balloon saga was hoax
• Raid targets Mexican cartel; 303 arrested,Largest US sting on drug cartel
• Jaycee Dugard Tells the World She's Getting Her Life Back
• NASA probes give moon a double smack
• Chicago Teenager's Gang-Related Beating Death Caught on Tape-2 held without bail for murder 1st degree
• "Worst of the Worst murder case" said Police- Mum, 5 kids killed in US
• Search dogs detect something on Garrido property- May found bodies in the house property.
• Lab Technician Is Charged in Yale Grad Student's Killing - Believe as Workplace violence.
• Police in Yale killing stake out hotel room-watching hotel where person of interest Raymond Clark is staying in murder case Annie Le
• Twitter and Facebook website got crashed. FAQ DoS Attack
• Ballon Boy.What happen? Is this a hoax?
• Mentall ill patient escape from field trip- Captured 4 days later.No one injured. Convicted for killing old man.
• Indonesia cannot relax militant fight: Australia PM
• Suspects in Dugard case investigated in two more disappearances-9 and 13 year old girl.
• Authorities Raid Office of Jackson's Doctor , Dr Conray Murray
• Michael Jackson - a childlike, shy genius
• Pop star Michael Jackson dead at 50
• Hamid Karzai accused by rival candidate of rigging Afghanistan election

Twitter and Facebook website got crashed. FAQ DoS Attack

-In a clear and simple way, this Cisco graphic shows the relationship of the parties in a DDOS attack. -


At 9 a.m., millions of users of Twitter.com found themselves unable to access the microblogging Web site, the modern version of the telephone party line through which more than 40 million people announce what they are doing, reading, eating and thinking at any given moment.

Undaunted, the rejected Twitterers trooped to Facebook.com, the social networking site that has more than 200 million users, which has "status updates" that mimic Twitter feeds. But before users could begin to type, "Is sad that Twitter is down," a terrible and panic-inducing discovery: Facebook was down, too.

Kathleen Loughlin, a spokeswoman for Facebook, also cited a denial-of-service attack, which she said "resulted in degraded service for some users." She added that no user data were at risk during the attack and promised that Facebook was "continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the official Twitter blog. "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as . . . Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now."

The first big DDoS attack, in February 2000 took down some of the Web's most popular sites for hours, including Yahoo, CNN, eBay, Amazon.com, Buy.com, and E*Trade. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation promptly held a news conference to discuss the disruption to the Internet and eventually tracked down the perpetrator, 15-year-old "Mafiaboy," after he bragged about it to friends online.

Mafiaboy was most likely trying to get attention, like script kiddie hackers do when they deface Web sites. Other attackers have different agendas. For instance, there are politically motivated DDoS attacks, such as those involving Russian and Georgian sites last year. Estonia sites were attacked in 2007. Meanwhile, the origin of recent DDoS attacks targeting U.S. government sites and sites in South Korea remain a mystery.

---------



Twitter users were unable to log in for several hours after the social networking site became the victim of a cyber attack.

-----

What's a denial-of-service attack?
A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is any effort designed to interfere with access to a Web site or Internet service. A common method of attack involves flooding a target server with so many communications requests that legitimate traffic can not get through. This can shut down or slow down the site temporarily.

Web sites aren't the only things that can be targeted in DoS attacks. Unplugging someone's computer is a very basic type of DoS attack.

What's a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack?
Because Web sites are built to handle a lot of traffic, it can take millions of simultaneous communications requests to have enough affect on the performance of the server for an attack. In a DDoS attack, tens of thousands or even millions of computers are used to send traffic to the target site all at the same time and repeatedly."It's a bit like 15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time--nothing can move."

What's a botnet?
The hijacked PCs that are used in a DDoS attack comprise a botnet. The individual computers are called "bots," "zombies" or "slaves" and are controlled remotely by the "master" attacker. The attacker relays instructions to the bots via a command-and-control server, typically using IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Botnets are also used to distribute spam. Some newer botnets, like one created by a version of Conficker, relay instructions via peer-to-peer.

How many bots are needed to take down a Web site?
The number depends on how much resources, servers and bandwidth, the target site has. It can take 25,000 to 50,000 bots to cripple a typical site and as few as 10,000 or less for a small Web site, according to Kevin Stevens, a security researcher for SecureWorks' Counter Threat Unit.

It's difficult to know exactly how big any particular botnet is and guesses vary widely. For example, estimates of the Conficker botnet ranged from 500,000 PCs to 10 million.

What kind of damage can a DoS attack do?
A DoS can make a Web site completely inaccessible to anyone for a period of time, like the most recent attack did with Twitter. Or it can be equivalent to a hiccup, slowing down page loads or affecting only part of the site.

Sites that aren't in the direct line of fire can also be affected. For example, if a company that is attacked is hosting images or content that is fed to other sites, those other sites may have trouble. So many sites feature Twitter updates that it's likely some of those associated sites were impacted when Twitter was down and the ancillary site's requests to get updates were ignored.

How can a DDoS be prevented or stopped?

In 2001, the White House was able to thwart a DDoS attack that was programmed into the code of the Code Red virus by moving the site away from the targeted IP address.

And in 2005, Microsoft sidestepped a DDoS that was going to be triggered by PCs infected with the Blaster virus by killing the targeted IP address.

A company can reduce its risk by buying plenty of servers and bandwidth, and hosting content on backup servers. Companies can also limit the number of connections that the Web server allows at any one time and set the firewall to block certain types of data that are used in DDoS attacks, said SecureWorks' Stevens.

What can individuals do to prevent their computers from being used in a DDoS attack?

To keep malware off a computer, people should install the latest operating system and application patches, update their antivirus and other security software, consider using auto-updates for browsers and be careful about opening up attachments and visiting Web sites.