Patriots’ defense writes alternate ending for Super Bowl

PHOENIX — Vince Wilfork was on the field when the Patriots defense let the Giants drive for the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl seven years ago.

He was on the field again three years ago when New England’s defense again couldn’t stop Eli Manning from leading the Giants down the field for the game-winning score in the final minutes.

This time, Wilfork and the defense finally got their redemption.

“To be a defensive player, to be on the field and put a stamp on it for us, that’s the most amazing feeling right now,” Wilfork said shortly after New England’s wild 28-24 win over the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX. “All year, we talked as a defense that we wanted to make plays when it counted. We wanted our teammates to count on us.”

And they delivered.

It took a total team effort, of course, to keep Seattle off the scoreboard for the final 19:54 of the game. After the Seahawks took a 24-14 lead, they gained just one first down on their next three possessions and punted all three times.

But the key play — the one Patriots fans will tell their grandkids about — was rookie Malcolm Butler’s interception in the end zone on second and goal from the 1 with 26 seconds left in the game.

“He just went down in history,” safety Patrick Chung said.

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll will be second-guessed for eternity for calling a pass on second down from the 1-yard line, especially with Marshawn Lynch running so well. Lynch rushed for 102 yards and a touchdown Sunday, and he had just rushed for 4 yards on the previous play.

“I think everybody was expecting run when you have Marshawn Lynch,” linebacker Dont’a Hightower said.

Everyone except Carroll and Butler, that is. Carroll explained that he didn’t like the matchup against New England’s goal-line package, which had a lot of beef up front — Wilfork, Alan Branch, Chris Jones, Sealver Siliga, Rob Ninkovich, Jamie Collins, Akeem Ayers, and Hightower. Carroll viewed second and 1 as almost a throw-away play, and if the Seahawks didn’t score there, he planned on running the ball on third and fourth down.

“It’s not the right matchup for us to run the football, so on second down we throw the ball, really, to kind of waste that play,” Carroll said. “No second thoughts or no hesitation in that at all.”

And credit Butler and the Patriots for doing their homework. They noticed the Seahawks came out in their three-receiver set, with Jermaine Kearse and Ricardo Lockette stacked on the right side.

“In preparation I remembered the formation they were in — two receiver stack. I just knew they were running a pick route,” Butler said.

Sure enough, Kearse ran a clear-out, and Lockette tried to run a quick slant underneath him. But Butler jumped the play perfectly and beat Lockette to the football, hauling in the interception and holding on for dear life. It was the first NFL interception for Butler, an undrafted rookie out of West Alabama, and he couldn’t have picked a better time for it.

“Goal line, three cornerbacks, you know they’re going to throw it,” Butler said. “I had a feeling I was going to make a big play, but not that big.”

“Boy, this is a hard thing to take,” Carroll said.

The script was different in this Super Bowl, but it almost finished like the last two. Just two plays before his interception, Butler was almost the Super Bowl goat, allowing a 33-yard pass to Kearse that he tipped in the air, was bobbled several times, and miraculously fell into Kearse’s lap. This was David Tyree, all over again.

Two plays later, though, Butler flipped the script.

“We call him ‘Scrap,’ because the first time we saw him, he was just so scrappy, around the ball the whole time,” Wilfork said of Butler. “That moment with him making that play, it’s just a fairytale end to the book because of what he’s done all year for us.”

The final sequence perfectly encapsulated the Patriots’ defensive performance on Sunday night — bad plays followed by spectacular plays. The Patriots completely shut down the Seahawks in the first quarter, holding them to just 15 yards of offense, while Wilson didn’t complete his first pass until less than six minutes remained in the second quarter. The Patriots did a good job of keeping Wilson in the pocket, and did a good job of swarming to Lynch.

But the Seahawks woke up in the second quarter thanks to unheralded receiver Chris Matthews, a former Arena and Canadian league player who entered Sunday’s game with zero career NFL catches.

But Matthews is the Seahawks’ biggest target at 6 feet 5 inches, and used every inch to his advantage. Matched up on Kyle Arrington, listed 7 inches shorter, Matthews caught a 44-yard jump ball in the second quarter and a 45-yarder in the third quarter to help Seattle crawl back into the game and eventually take the lead. He also caught a jump ball over Logan Ryan, listed at 6 inches shorter, for an 11-yard touchdown catch right before the half.

So the Patriots did what they do best — make halftime adjustments. Arrington and Ryan were taken out of the game in the third quarter, and Brandon Browner, the NFL’s tallest cornerback at 6-4, was moved over to Matthews.

“Kyle, no disrespect to my buddy, but that was just a mismatch,” Browner said. “Kyle was actually in good position, but the guy got him by a whole foot. I just said, ‘Let me get him. I match his size.’ ” 

With Browner matching him inch-for-inch, Matthews didn’t have another catch.

“I just match up well with big guys,” he said.

The Patriots were as stunned as everyone when Kearse made his circus catch late in the fourth quarter.

“My mom said she stopped watching in the last two minutes and just prayed,” safety Devin McCourty said.

But they fought through adversity all season, and stressed to each other in the huddle to do it one more time, and to just make one more play.

“We never lost faith, we never stopped believing,” Wilfork said. “To win the Super Bowl by a defensive stop, I’m telling you, it’s priceless.”

Facebook kills pic of Mohammed weeks after Zuck's Je suis Charlie!

Don't harm the profit, I mean, prophet. No, wait, profit

Earlier this month, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that his social network, used by millions, was a free-speech zone.

"As I reflect on the attack and my own experience with extremism, this is what we all need to reject – a group of extremists trying to silence the voices and opinions of everyone else around the world," the behoodied one posted on his own site at the time.

"I won't let that happen on Facebook. I'm committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence. My thoughts are with the victims, their families, the people of France and the people all over the world who choose to share their views and ideas, even when that takes courage. ‪#‎JeSuisCharlie"‬

A month after that statement, Facebook pulled a Turkish user's page after it displayed an image of Mohammed taken from French satire mag Charlie Hebdo, after a court in Turkey ruled that it infringed a local law which forbids representations of the prophet being displayed.

A well-placed source familiar with the matter said Facebook had to block content so that it's no longer visible in Turkey following a valid legal request from the court. The single page is now offline in the country, but can be viewed outside of the state's borders.

This isn't the first time the company has been accused of kowtowing to local laws at the expense of free speech. In November, Facebook removed a notice from Putin critic Alexei Navalny after Russian internet regulators requested the censorship.

In Zuckerberg's post on the Hebdo atrocity, he made it clear Facebook follows local laws in the countries it operates in. But we live in times when you can be flogged a thousand times for posting something on the social network, and some in Silicon Valley are disappointed the moneybags firm is not doing more to stand up for free speech.

HACKER WAR: ANONYMOUS VS. THE LIZARD SQUAD

The UK Mirror reports a hacking crossfire between Anonymous Protection—a branch of famed hacker collective Anonymous—and the Lizard Squad, which has lately been renting itself out as a band of cyber-attack mercenaries, while threatening to release nude photos of singer Taylor Swift in its spare time.

 Anonymous Protection took to social media to crow about a successful effort to shut down the Lizard Squad’s website and Twitter account

As the Mirror recounts, this attack was carried out in retaliation for Lizard Squad threats against Anonymous, plus extremely annoying denial-of-service attacks carried against the Xbox and PlayStation gaming networks on Christmas Day. The Lizard Squad claims to have been behind the North Korean Internet crash in December. They’ve been named as the culprits behind Facebook and Instagram crashes just this week. They also hacked the website of the unfortunate Malaysia Airlines, littering the site with phony threats from ISIS and replacing the home page with a supremely tasteless riff on the standard error message for missing web pages: “404 – PLANE NOT FOUND.” lizard_squad_hack

It’s hard to know your hacker collectives without a scorecard these days, since new groups pull off headline-grabbing attacks on such a regular basis, but contrary to all the ISIS and “cyber caliphate” references, the Lizard Squad does not appear to be linked to the terrorist state.

They remain one of the more enigmatic hacker groups, without much in the way of a defining agenda thus far, although members interviewed under pseudonyms have claimed they want to demonstrate how easily major commercial networks such as Microsoft’s can be penetrated, to shame the companies into developing better security measures.

The Anonymous hacker collective has increasingly been at odds with the Lizard Squad, angrily warning them in December to stop messing around with the encrypted “dark web” network Tor. At the height of its attack, the Lizard Squad took control of almost half of Tor’s relays, using what it alleged were “zero-day” security flaws completely unknown to network engineers, as part of its mission to demonstrate that secure websites are not as secure as their proprietors claim. This angered Anonymous because the Tor network is used by dissidents and whistleblowers seeking to evade monitoring by corrupt governments.

The Lizard Squad’s response to Anonymous was “Do something,” and now it would appear Anonymous has, possibly with the assistance of disgruntled Lizard Squad members who formed yet another hacking collective called “Finest Squad.” The Finest Squad counted coup on their own Twitter account when the Lizard Squad’s account was suspended:

With all these hacker wars raging, using the Internet for constructive purposes is getting to be like crossing a Wild West street during a shootout.

Lizard Squad hackers get HACKED

Website offline and Twitter account suspended after series of cyberattacks

The Lizard Squad 'hackers' have been causing a lot of cyber mischief lately, but they've just got a taste of their own medicine. Their website has been taken offline and their Twitter account - @lizardmafia - has been suspended, with a branch of 'hacktivist' group Anonymous taking the credit.

The news was announced by Anonymous Protection with a tweet saying: “LizardSquad website has been cleaned out and is offline: lizardpatrol.com. LizardSquad Twitter is now suspended: @lizardmafia. We WIN.”

The Anonymous Protection group says it’s "dedicated to protect the people of the internet" and chose to take on Lizard Squad after the group made threats against Anonymous and carried out a number of denial of service cyberattacks (DDoS).

The cyberattacks took down a number of key websites, including Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network on Christmas day. The Lizards have since been using Twitter to advertise their "cyberattack-for-hire" service, Lizard Stresser.

Most recently Lizard Squad hacked Taylor Swift's Twitter account and threatened to release nude pictures.

Anonymous Protection seems to have delivered on its promise, taking down Lizard Squad’s website using a similar denial-of-service attack, and hammering Twitter with complaints so that social network took down the @lizardmafia account.

Twitter/@Lizardmafia

Lizard Squad Twitter page

Twitter doesn't comment on individual cases, but will take down accounts if they post other people’s private information without their permission or make threats. Twitter can also suspend accounts if they use the service “in furtherance of illegal activities”.

Facebook outage yesterday—a technical glitch, not a cyber attack

The Facebook outage yesterday, which lasted for about one hour, was an internal technical glitch, said Facebook in a statement on its website.

“This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” said the statement.

Facebook and its photo site Instagram were unavailable to its users between 7.15 pm and 8.15 pm NZ time across the United States, Europe and Asia.

The Facebook breakdown flooded Twitter with complains and jokes, with “#facebookdown”and “#SocialMeltdown2015” trending.

Some suggested Lizard Squad, a hacker group that claimed to attack Microsoft and Sony gaming networks over Christmas, were behind the outage. A twitter read, “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad.”

For legions of users, it was just a blip while companies dependent upon Facebook, such as Tinder and over 75,000 other websites, were affected by the disruption.

A technical fault sounded more plausible than a cyberattack because a DDoS attack would have made sites inaccessible to its users rather than displaying an error message, said Guillermo Lafuente, security consultant at MWR InfoSecurity.

Additionally, the outage was global and had it been a cybercrime, the impact would have been localized to one particular area as Facebook has multiple data centers.

Facebook, headquartered at California, has more than 1.35 billion active users globally, with more than 80% of its users outside the US and Canada.

Facebook had suffered a massive outage in September 2010 that lasted for about 2.5 hours. Early then outages were common as the system was not robust. However, off late a Californian company, Menlo Park, routinely checks its infrastructure and resilience.

Isis threatens to behead Barack Obama and 'transform America into a Muslim province'

An Isis fighter has threatened to behead Barack Obama “in the White House and transform America into a Muslim province” before murdering a Kurdish soldier in a gruesome propaganda video.

The footage, entitled “Bombardment of Peaceful Muslims in the City of Mosul” showed damage from shelling allegedly carried out by Peshmerga forces in the Iraqi city earlier this month before killing the captive in retaliation.

The masked Isis fighter threatened attacks on the US, France, Belgium and the Kurds, claiming that the group’s followers will kill the American and Kurdish presidents as well as detonating car bombs and explosives in European countries that are part of the international coalition fighting against it.

He claims Peshmerga forces “shells the peaceful Muslims of Mosul with American Crusader bombs, and has poisoned dozens of them with asphyxiating gases” as images are shown of damaged buildings, bodies and injured children.

Then the jihadist issues “a message to the entire world” in Kurdish, translated by the Memri Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor.

“This is the fate of anyone who opposes Islam. Know, oh Obama, that we will reach America. Know also that we will cut off your head in the White House and transform America into a Muslim province,” he says.

“And this is my message to France and its sister, Belgium. We advise you that we will come to you with car bombs and explosive charges and we will cut off your heads.”

The fighter then beheads the captive with a knife to cheers from the gathered crowd, threatening to send Kurdish president Masoud Barzani a soldier’s head for every missile the Peshmerga launch.

Isis, which has overrun swathes of Iraq and Syria, has made a number of similar statements since a US-led coalition mounted air strikes against its fighters last year and frequently uses beheading videos as a platform for its propaganda.

As well as the filmed murders of foreign hostages James Foley, David Haines, Alan Henning and most recently, Japanese aid worker Haruna Yukawa, public beheadings have become commonplace in its territories where death is the penalty for numerous unproved “crimes”.

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), the video threatening Obama was released by Isis on Monday, two days after heavy Peshmerga shelling and coalition air strikes were reported in its stronghold of Mosul.

It is the largest city controlled by Isis and one of its longest-standing strongholds in Iraq.

 On Saturday, news agencies reported an increase in US air strikes around Mosul aiming to disrupt Isis supply routes ahead of an expected operation later this year to re-take it from militants.

Coalition airstrikes hit at least two dozen locations around Mosul, destroying dozens of vehicles, buildings, fighting positions and insurgent units, military officials said.

The US has claimed that the coalition has “halted the momentum” of Isis, which made most of its gains largely unchallenged last year.

No foreign armies have yet sent group troops to fight Islamists in the region as fears increase of more Isis-inspired terror attacks following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Ottawa shootings, Sydney siege and numerous failed plots in the UK, Belgium and across Europe.

American authorities have launched investigations into reports of civilian casualties reportedly incurred during strikes aimed at Isis in Iraq and Syria but none have yet been confirmed.

Since the strikes began in August, Washington has said it takes reports of civilian casualties seriously but did not acknowledge that it had started formal investigations until earlier this month.

In September, the White House admitted that much-publicised standards imposed by President Obama to prevent civilian deaths in drone strikes did not apply to operations in Syria and Iraq.

Facebook: Hackers Didn’t Cause Worldwide Outage

Despite hacking group Lizard Squad's claims, Facebook said it was not hacked

Facebook says hackers didn’t cause a worldwide outage Tuesday morning, denying claims made by a rogue hacker group. Instead, the company said the 45-minute Facebook and Instagram outages were the result of an internal change made on the social network’s systems.

The disruption “was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” a Facebook spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal. “We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”

Hacking group Lizard Squad appeared to claim responsibility for the outages, which made it impossible for Facebook and Instagram users to access those websites and apps.

British police have reportedly arrested a Lizard Squad member

British authorities have arrested a person said to have links with Lizard Squad, the hacking organization claiming responsibility for disrupting Xbox Live and PlayStation Network on Christmas Day, according to the Daily Dot.

A copy of the search warrant provided to the Dot identifies Vinnie Omari, a 22-year-old living in the United Kingdom, as the person behind the outages. Law enforcement officials reportedly seized phones, laptops and an Xbox from Omari's home, according to the Dot.

The Dot says Omari provided the media outlet with the search warrant and the information about the arrest, but that they were not able to confirm the details with local police.

Previous reports had speculated that the name Omari was an alias, but the police documents releasing him on bail used that name, according to the Dot story.

The arrest highlights the pressure that investigators are putting on Lizard Squad after a string of antics this year raised the group's profile. In an interview last week, another member of the group identifying himself as "Ryan," said Lizard Squad gave Sony employee logins to Guardians of Peace, the hackers suspected of breaking into Sony's network and initially prompting the company to pull "The Interview" from theaters. Lizard Squad also caused an American Airlines flight bearing a Sony executive to be diverted in August when the hackers tweeted a bomb threat to the airline. In the interview, Ryan expressed regret over how far the stunt went.

On Wednesday, Lizard Mafia's Twitter account began reporting that Ryan had been arrested by Finnish authorities.

Social media sites knocked offline, #LizardSquad hack group claims responsibility

 

 

The hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for what it said was an attack that briefly knocked several social networking sites, including Facebook and Instagram, offline early Tuesday. 

The Facebook glitch was reported in the United States, Asia, Australia, and the U.K. and affected access to the site from personal computers and from Facebook's mobile app. The social media giant's Instagram service was also inaccessible.

Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the outage in a Twitter posting that listed the sites it said it had affected, which included matchmaking app Tinder, AIM, and HipChat. The message concluded with the hashtagged statements "offline" and "LizardSquad."

Facebook denied that it had been hacked and claimed that the disruption was caused by a technical change it made to the site. On its website for developers, Facebook said the "major outage" lasted one hour.

The LizardSquad group has previously claimed to have been responsible for a Christmas Day outage that affected Xbox and PlayStation Live services late last year. On Monday, the group said it had hacked the website of Malaysia Airlines, changing the site to display a message reading "404 - Plane Not Found" and that it was "Hacked by Cyber Caliphate," with a photo of one of the airline's Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. The browser tab for the website said "ISIS will prevail", a reference to the Islamic State terror group.

Lizard Squad occasionally makes tongue-in-cheek claims to support Islamic State, although there are no known links between the groups. The group also claimed that it was "going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon," and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline's internal email system.

Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users and Instagram has some 300 million.
News of the Facebook outage set rival social network Twitter alight, propelling the hashtag "facebookdown" to top trend on the site. It comes ahead of Facebook reporting its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.

As access to Facebook returned, some users in Asia reported that the site was loading slowly or not offering full functionality.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.