By Leslie Horn
Is Apple planning an AirPort refresh? Several Apple-watching blogs are reporting that supplies of AirPort, AirPort Extreme, and Time Capsule are scant at best, which suggests an update could be on its way.
"Sources" and "readers" have told TUAW that many Apple Stores are completely out of the devices.
"We've heard nothing in the tech grapevine about upcoming refreshes to the AirPort line of products, but generally when Apple's inventory channels get constrained like this, it's a good sign that a product update is imminent," TUAW noted.
MacRumors also chimed in to report that AirPort and Time Capsule product stock is quickly dwindling at Apple retail locations. MacRumors cited its own sources and readers that told the blog of Apple sales reps "indicating that no new shipments appeared to be planned."
Considering Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off next week (June 6) in Cupertino, a product announcement could be coming in a few days. Apple has said the focus of WWDC will be on software, and earlier this week, the company divulged that CEO Steve Jobs will unveil iCloud and iOS 5 in the keynote address at WWDC. However, there is speculation that an AirPort-esque product with some sort of tie-in to iCloud could also debut at the conference.
According to unconfirmed reports, there's one piece of hardware that Apple fanboys probably shouldn't hold out for at WWDC. Many sources have speculated that the iPhone 5 won't appear at the conference, as earlier iPhones have in the past.
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2011/06/02
Spyware, the FBI, and The Failure of ISPs
Why can't ISPs routinely look at network activity and use deep-packet sniffing to find infected machines and tell the customer in the first place?
Operation Adeona, it was called. It involved the FBI. Spyware. Intrigue. Controversy. The FBI took it upon itself to attack one of the miserable botnets that plagues the Internet to figure out how to intercept its "calling home function." And essentially it ended up giving it new and less destructive instructions. Let me try to explain.
Botnets generally consist of thousands of infected computers that have some specific piece of malware installed. Your computer at home may be one of them. The malicious code is usually in the form of a Trojan Horse that was planted by a Web site or some code you mistakenly clicked on. Once installed on your computer it doesn't really do much until called into action.
The idea nowadays is to inhabit your machine for nefarious purposes including mailing spam from your account, pinging a target computer to harass someone, or even to do odd sorts of market research. Most of the time these infected machines do their dirty work after hours and seldom during the day when an observant owner might spot the dubious activity.
It is a public nuisance. I cannot emphasize enough how people should run some good scanners to ferret out these programs. Millions of machines are infected.
Anyway, so the FBI decided to counterattack one of the major botnets called Coreflood, which is used to loot bank accounts. The FBI was to replace the servers communicating with infected Coreflood machines with its own servers, and also to disable the Coreflood malware on the infected machines. This process seems to have gonewell and the botnet was mostly silenced and had no way of getting any more nefarious instructions, rendering it useless. The problem is that the code is still on the machines. Now it gets dicey.
Is the FBI Going Too Far?
The FBI wants to take things a step further and let the code phone home to get an instruction to remove itself from the infected machines. In other words, it wants to haveeach personal computer erase code without the permission of its owner. Thus a controversy is now brewing.
Privacy advocates see this as the beginning of the end insofar as government interference with private PCs goes. It would be pretty effortless to snoop on personal machines and perhaps find illegal MP3 files or fake copies of Windows or whatever. Then the government could erase the copies or have you arrested or disable your machine completely. These are justified fears, but I do not see any of this current process actually leading to that.
In this instance the FBI appears to have been quite careful about everything and is showing no signs of being the camel head in the tent. I'd love to see the FBI uninstall these Trojans from any machine that would accept the uninstall code. There is a fear that doing this might damage some machines somehow. Perhaps the uninstall would take place while the machine was being used and a disk access was affected by the uninstall and important data was lost. There are a lot of possibilities and most are bad.
But the FBI is collecting the ping information from the machines, and some people hope that the Agency could work with ISPs and tell the specific owners of the machines that their machine is infected and they need to take action. This idea is the most reasonable approach as far as I'm concerned.
The Role ISPs Should Be Playing
But here is the element missing from the whole mess: None of this should be necessary. ISPs should be monitoring their networks themselves and looking for botnets everywhere.
I had a machine once that was infected and sending out millions of pings while I chatted with tech support. I ran a virus scanner and found some Trojan; I erased it, and the machine was great after that.
The tech support guy saw the machine was doing this and reported it to me. Why can't all the ISPs routinely look at the activity on the network and use deep-packet sniffing to find these infected machines and tell the customer in the first place? How hard can it be? It's believed they can deep-sniff a Skype call, why not find these bots? After all, it would save bandwidth and be a benefit to everyone.
I have no objection to the FBI trying to fix the problem, but
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Operation Adeona, it was called. It involved the FBI. Spyware. Intrigue. Controversy. The FBI took it upon itself to attack one of the miserable botnets that plagues the Internet to figure out how to intercept its "calling home function." And essentially it ended up giving it new and less destructive instructions. Let me try to explain.
Botnets generally consist of thousands of infected computers that have some specific piece of malware installed. Your computer at home may be one of them. The malicious code is usually in the form of a Trojan Horse that was planted by a Web site or some code you mistakenly clicked on. Once installed on your computer it doesn't really do much until called into action.
The idea nowadays is to inhabit your machine for nefarious purposes including mailing spam from your account, pinging a target computer to harass someone, or even to do odd sorts of market research. Most of the time these infected machines do their dirty work after hours and seldom during the day when an observant owner might spot the dubious activity.
It is a public nuisance. I cannot emphasize enough how people should run some good scanners to ferret out these programs. Millions of machines are infected.
Anyway, so the FBI decided to counterattack one of the major botnets called Coreflood, which is used to loot bank accounts. The FBI was to replace the servers communicating with infected Coreflood machines with its own servers, and also to disable the Coreflood malware on the infected machines. This process seems to have gonewell and the botnet was mostly silenced and had no way of getting any more nefarious instructions, rendering it useless. The problem is that the code is still on the machines. Now it gets dicey.
Is the FBI Going Too Far?
The FBI wants to take things a step further and let the code phone home to get an instruction to remove itself from the infected machines. In other words, it wants to haveeach personal computer erase code without the permission of its owner. Thus a controversy is now brewing.
Privacy advocates see this as the beginning of the end insofar as government interference with private PCs goes. It would be pretty effortless to snoop on personal machines and perhaps find illegal MP3 files or fake copies of Windows or whatever. Then the government could erase the copies or have you arrested or disable your machine completely. These are justified fears, but I do not see any of this current process actually leading to that.
In this instance the FBI appears to have been quite careful about everything and is showing no signs of being the camel head in the tent. I'd love to see the FBI uninstall these Trojans from any machine that would accept the uninstall code. There is a fear that doing this might damage some machines somehow. Perhaps the uninstall would take place while the machine was being used and a disk access was affected by the uninstall and important data was lost. There are a lot of possibilities and most are bad.
But the FBI is collecting the ping information from the machines, and some people hope that the Agency could work with ISPs and tell the specific owners of the machines that their machine is infected and they need to take action. This idea is the most reasonable approach as far as I'm concerned.
The Role ISPs Should Be Playing
But here is the element missing from the whole mess: None of this should be necessary. ISPs should be monitoring their networks themselves and looking for botnets everywhere.
I had a machine once that was infected and sending out millions of pings while I chatted with tech support. I ran a virus scanner and found some Trojan; I erased it, and the machine was great after that.
The tech support guy saw the machine was doing this and reported it to me. Why can't all the ISPs routinely look at the activity on the network and use deep-packet sniffing to find these infected machines and tell the customer in the first place? How hard can it be? It's believed they can deep-sniff a Skype call, why not find these bots? After all, it would save bandwidth and be a benefit to everyone.
I have no objection to the FBI trying to fix the problem, but
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Porting Windows 8 on the ARM Chip?
There seems to be an outbreak of stupidity in the computing world, as various factions are up in ARMs (pun intended) over Microsoft's desire to port Windows 8 on to the ARM chip, so people can have a very low-powered option on tablets. One can also assume that the ARM chip will show up elsewhere.
So at a shareholder meeting, Intel said that people running Windows on the ARM chip will find that their older Windows software will not work. Now there seems to be some backlash from various Microsofties and other folks accusing Intel of being "misleading."
Excuse me? How are they being misleading? Old X86 software expecting to find an X86 chip underneath the Windows' umbrella will not work on an ARM chip. I suppose it could work if an emulator could be cobbled together, and the software could be tricked into seeing an X86 chip, and the code could be ground up by the emulator and sent to ARM for execution, but can you imagine that? What a nightmare. Generally speaking, emulators only work when the chip doing the emulation is more powerful, not less powerful than the chip they are emulating. This would be laughable.
Microsoft says that Intel is misleading the public, but would not comment in any detail as to how the public is being misled. It seems to me that Intel is just being honest about the situation and Microsoft is playing games.
Of course, much of the brouhaha stems from the irksome idea that Windows will be ported to an ARM chip. And while you can be sure that all the Microsoft apps will be recompiled for the ARM chip, most other Windows software will not be ported to ARM. I am not expecting to see a full blown copy of Photoshop, for example, running on the ARM chip anytime soon.
The real commentary here is that Microsoft is tired of being two steps behind in the tablet business and needs to find a way to get in on the action before it is too late and Apple and Android own the space.
The way I see it, it is already too late unless Microsoft does something other than Windows on ARM.
Meanwhile, Intel should do two things: 1.) Find a way to compete with ARM in low-powered computing and 2.) Quit fretting about Windows on ARM. Who cares?
Intel needs to recall the olden days in the early 1990s when Microsoft decided that it was going to port Windows NT on to every chip it could. So it moved NT onto the PowerPC chip and a couple of other non-Intel chips. The PowerPC version was actually in the wild and was dynamite. But at the end of the day, it was a waste of time for Microsoft, and the whole project was scrapped. As I recall, there was even some talk about Windows on a mainframe.
I actually appreciate the fact that Microsoft realizes that it cannot live as a perpetual common law wife with Intel X86. There is no security in that relationship. But this ARM action is all futile.
I have been stunned over the years trying to figure out why Microsoft cannot develop alternative operating systems that have nothing to do with Windows. You know, like something that has no legacy dating back to the 8080 chip. Microsoft did play around in the Unix space for a while with Xenix, and there is a phone OS I suppose. But even the phone OS is based on old, original Windows. It's not the same sort of thing that Apple and Android are doing.
This is what Microsoft needs to do: something different. And Intel should ignore this altogether, although I suppose the company was kind of minding its own business when the fight broke out.
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So at a shareholder meeting, Intel said that people running Windows on the ARM chip will find that their older Windows software will not work. Now there seems to be some backlash from various Microsofties and other folks accusing Intel of being "misleading."
Excuse me? How are they being misleading? Old X86 software expecting to find an X86 chip underneath the Windows' umbrella will not work on an ARM chip. I suppose it could work if an emulator could be cobbled together, and the software could be tricked into seeing an X86 chip, and the code could be ground up by the emulator and sent to ARM for execution, but can you imagine that? What a nightmare. Generally speaking, emulators only work when the chip doing the emulation is more powerful, not less powerful than the chip they are emulating. This would be laughable.
Microsoft says that Intel is misleading the public, but would not comment in any detail as to how the public is being misled. It seems to me that Intel is just being honest about the situation and Microsoft is playing games.
Of course, much of the brouhaha stems from the irksome idea that Windows will be ported to an ARM chip. And while you can be sure that all the Microsoft apps will be recompiled for the ARM chip, most other Windows software will not be ported to ARM. I am not expecting to see a full blown copy of Photoshop, for example, running on the ARM chip anytime soon.
The real commentary here is that Microsoft is tired of being two steps behind in the tablet business and needs to find a way to get in on the action before it is too late and Apple and Android own the space.
The way I see it, it is already too late unless Microsoft does something other than Windows on ARM.
Meanwhile, Intel should do two things: 1.) Find a way to compete with ARM in low-powered computing and 2.) Quit fretting about Windows on ARM. Who cares?
Intel needs to recall the olden days in the early 1990s when Microsoft decided that it was going to port Windows NT on to every chip it could. So it moved NT onto the PowerPC chip and a couple of other non-Intel chips. The PowerPC version was actually in the wild and was dynamite. But at the end of the day, it was a waste of time for Microsoft, and the whole project was scrapped. As I recall, there was even some talk about Windows on a mainframe.
I actually appreciate the fact that Microsoft realizes that it cannot live as a perpetual common law wife with Intel X86. There is no security in that relationship. But this ARM action is all futile.
I have been stunned over the years trying to figure out why Microsoft cannot develop alternative operating systems that have nothing to do with Windows. You know, like something that has no legacy dating back to the 8080 chip. Microsoft did play around in the Unix space for a while with Xenix, and there is a phone OS I suppose. But even the phone OS is based on old, original Windows. It's not the same sort of thing that Apple and Android are doing.
This is what Microsoft needs to do: something different. And Intel should ignore this altogether, although I suppose the company was kind of minding its own business when the fight broke out.
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McAfee: Malware Skyrockets in First Quarter
By Chloe Albanesius
Malware is apparently the new spam. McAfee tracked more than six million unique malware samples in the first quarter, making it the most active quarter for malware ever.
"It's been a busy start to 2011 for cybercriminals," Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs, said in a statement.
February was the most active malware month with 2.75 million samples, McAfee said. The company also tracked more than 350,000 fake anti-virus software samples in March 2011, its highest levels in more than a year. Spam, however, was at its lowest levels since 2007, thanks in part to the demise of the Rustock botnet.
"Even though this past quarter once again showed that spam has slowed, it doesn't mean that cybercriminals aren't actively pursuing alternate avenues," Weafer continued. "We're seeing a lot of emerging threats, such as Android malware and new botnets attempting to take over where Rustock left off, that will have a significant impact on the activity we see quarter after quarter."
Symbian is still the most popular OS for mobile malware, but Android is making gains to come in at number two. Part of the problem, McAfee said, is that Google allows side-loading of Android apps and does not have a centralized place where it checks apps for suspicious behavior.
Google this week removed more than two dozen apps from the Android Market due to malware. Mobile security firm NetQuin also identified malware on at least 20 Android apps that auto-dialed phones to incur high user fees.
On the spam front, McAfee tracked 1.5 trillion messages per day, but that is less than half of what it was one year ago.
In September, government agencies here and abroad arrested dozens of international cyber-gangsters responsible for the Zeus botnet, while Rustock went down in March thanks to Microsoft, anti-malware company FireEye, the University of Washington, and pharmaceutical firm Pfizer.
McAfee warned, however, that Zeus' author is working to merge the Zeus source code with the SpyEye botnet, which can affect banking and online transactions. There is also competition from other botnets like Maazben, Bobaz, Lethic, Cutwail, and Grum.
"There was a strong uptick in new botnet infections toward the end of Q1, most likely due to the reseeding process, where cybercriminals slow down activity in order to spend time rebuilding botnets," McAfee said. "The botnet takedowns have resulted in an increase in the price of sending spam on the underground marketplace, showing that the laws of supply and demand also apply to cybercrime."
Why are people falling for these threats? Not surprisingly, sophisticated cyber criminals try to mask their schemes in pretty packages. Spam promoting physical products was the most popular way to lure people in; beware of iPad and HDTV emails, apparently. McAfee also noticed a rise in "banker" Trojans, which lure people in with things like UPS, FedEx, USPS, and the IRS. Spammers are also taking advantage of current events, like the Japan earthquake and tsunamis.
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Malware is apparently the new spam. McAfee tracked more than six million unique malware samples in the first quarter, making it the most active quarter for malware ever.
"It's been a busy start to 2011 for cybercriminals," Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs, said in a statement.
February was the most active malware month with 2.75 million samples, McAfee said. The company also tracked more than 350,000 fake anti-virus software samples in March 2011, its highest levels in more than a year. Spam, however, was at its lowest levels since 2007, thanks in part to the demise of the Rustock botnet.
"Even though this past quarter once again showed that spam has slowed, it doesn't mean that cybercriminals aren't actively pursuing alternate avenues," Weafer continued. "We're seeing a lot of emerging threats, such as Android malware and new botnets attempting to take over where Rustock left off, that will have a significant impact on the activity we see quarter after quarter."
Symbian is still the most popular OS for mobile malware, but Android is making gains to come in at number two. Part of the problem, McAfee said, is that Google allows side-loading of Android apps and does not have a centralized place where it checks apps for suspicious behavior.
Google this week removed more than two dozen apps from the Android Market due to malware. Mobile security firm NetQuin also identified malware on at least 20 Android apps that auto-dialed phones to incur high user fees.
On the spam front, McAfee tracked 1.5 trillion messages per day, but that is less than half of what it was one year ago.
In September, government agencies here and abroad arrested dozens of international cyber-gangsters responsible for the Zeus botnet, while Rustock went down in March thanks to Microsoft, anti-malware company FireEye, the University of Washington, and pharmaceutical firm Pfizer.
McAfee warned, however, that Zeus' author is working to merge the Zeus source code with the SpyEye botnet, which can affect banking and online transactions. There is also competition from other botnets like Maazben, Bobaz, Lethic, Cutwail, and Grum.
"There was a strong uptick in new botnet infections toward the end of Q1, most likely due to the reseeding process, where cybercriminals slow down activity in order to spend time rebuilding botnets," McAfee said. "The botnet takedowns have resulted in an increase in the price of sending spam on the underground marketplace, showing that the laws of supply and demand also apply to cybercrime."
Why are people falling for these threats? Not surprisingly, sophisticated cyber criminals try to mask their schemes in pretty packages. Spam promoting physical products was the most popular way to lure people in; beware of iPad and HDTV emails, apparently. McAfee also noticed a rise in "banker" Trojans, which lure people in with things like UPS, FedEx, USPS, and the IRS. Spammers are also taking advantage of current events, like the Japan earthquake and tsunamis.
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Hacker concern on the rise, White House warns of potential cyber strikes
The United States is warning that a cyber attack -- presumably if it is devastating enough -- could result in real-world military retaliation.
Easier said than done.
In the wake of a significant new hacking attempt against Lockheed Martin Corp, experts say it could be extremely difficult to know fast enough with any certainty where an attack came from. Sophisticated hackers can mask their tracks and make it look like a cyber strike came from somewhere else.
There are also hard questions about the legality of such reprisals and the fact that other responses, like financial sanctions or cyber countermeasures, may be more appropriate than military action, analysts say.
"There are a lot of challenges to retaliating to a cyber attack," said Kristin Lord, author of a new report on U.S. cyber strategy at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.
"It is extremely difficult to establish attribution, to link a specific attack to a specific actor, like a foreign government."
The White House stated plainly in a report last month that Washington would respond to hostile acts in cyberspace "as we would to any other threat to our country" -- a position articulated in the past by U.S. officials.
The Pentagon, which is finalizing its own report, due out in June, on the Obama administration's emerging strategy to deal with the cyber threat, acknowledged that possibility on Tuesday.
"A response to a cyber incident or attack on the U.S. would not necessarily be a cyber response ... all appropriate options would be on the table," Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said.
The sophistication of hackers and frequency of the attacks came back into focus after a May 21 attack on Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon's top arms supplier.
Lockheed said the "tenacious" cyber attack on its network was part of a pattern of attacks on it from around the world. The U.S. Defense Department estimates that over 100 foreign intelligence organizations have attempted to break into U.S. networks.
Every year, hackers steal enough data from U.S. government agencies, businesses and universities to fill the U.S. Library of Congress many times over, officials say.
BEHIND THE CURVE
Several current and former national security officials said U.S. intelligence agencies did not appear particularly concerned about the Lockheed attack. One official said that similar cyber attacks directed at defense contractors and government agencies occurred all the time.
Some critics say the Obama administration is not moving fast enough to keep up with the cyber threat or to develop a strategy that fully addresses concerns about privacy and oversight in the cyber domain.
"The United States, in general, is well behind the curve," said Sami Saydjari, president of the privately held Cyber Defense Agency, pointing to "significant strategic advances" out of countries like China and Russia.
China has generally emerged as a prime suspect when it comes to keyboard-launched espionage against U.S. interests, but proving Beijing is behind any future plot would be difficult because of hackers' ability to misdirect, analysts say. China has denied any connection to cyber attacks.
The Pentagon's upcoming report is not expected to address different doomsday scenarios, or offer what Washington's response would be if, say, hackers wiped out Wall Street financial data, plunged the U.S. Northeast into darkness or hacked U.S. warships' computers.
"We're not going to necessarily lay out -- 'if this happens, we will do this.' Because again the point is if we are attacked, we reserve the right to do any number of things in response," Lapan said.
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Easier said than done.
In the wake of a significant new hacking attempt against Lockheed Martin Corp, experts say it could be extremely difficult to know fast enough with any certainty where an attack came from. Sophisticated hackers can mask their tracks and make it look like a cyber strike came from somewhere else.
There are also hard questions about the legality of such reprisals and the fact that other responses, like financial sanctions or cyber countermeasures, may be more appropriate than military action, analysts say.
"There are a lot of challenges to retaliating to a cyber attack," said Kristin Lord, author of a new report on U.S. cyber strategy at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.
"It is extremely difficult to establish attribution, to link a specific attack to a specific actor, like a foreign government."
The White House stated plainly in a report last month that Washington would respond to hostile acts in cyberspace "as we would to any other threat to our country" -- a position articulated in the past by U.S. officials.
The Pentagon, which is finalizing its own report, due out in June, on the Obama administration's emerging strategy to deal with the cyber threat, acknowledged that possibility on Tuesday.
"A response to a cyber incident or attack on the U.S. would not necessarily be a cyber response ... all appropriate options would be on the table," Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said.
The sophistication of hackers and frequency of the attacks came back into focus after a May 21 attack on Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon's top arms supplier.
Lockheed said the "tenacious" cyber attack on its network was part of a pattern of attacks on it from around the world. The U.S. Defense Department estimates that over 100 foreign intelligence organizations have attempted to break into U.S. networks.
Every year, hackers steal enough data from U.S. government agencies, businesses and universities to fill the U.S. Library of Congress many times over, officials say.
BEHIND THE CURVE
Several current and former national security officials said U.S. intelligence agencies did not appear particularly concerned about the Lockheed attack. One official said that similar cyber attacks directed at defense contractors and government agencies occurred all the time.
Some critics say the Obama administration is not moving fast enough to keep up with the cyber threat or to develop a strategy that fully addresses concerns about privacy and oversight in the cyber domain.
"The United States, in general, is well behind the curve," said Sami Saydjari, president of the privately held Cyber Defense Agency, pointing to "significant strategic advances" out of countries like China and Russia.
China has generally emerged as a prime suspect when it comes to keyboard-launched espionage against U.S. interests, but proving Beijing is behind any future plot would be difficult because of hackers' ability to misdirect, analysts say. China has denied any connection to cyber attacks.
The Pentagon's upcoming report is not expected to address different doomsday scenarios, or offer what Washington's response would be if, say, hackers wiped out Wall Street financial data, plunged the U.S. Northeast into darkness or hacked U.S. warships' computers.
"We're not going to necessarily lay out -- 'if this happens, we will do this.' Because again the point is if we are attacked, we reserve the right to do any number of things in response," Lapan said.
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French minister resigns after 2 women claim foot massages escalated into sexual attacks
A minister under French President Nicolas Sarkozy has resigned after two former female colleagues said he sexually assaulted them while giving them foot massages.
French officials opened a probe last week against George Tron, a junior civil service minister and mayor of the southern Paris suburb of Draveil, after two women said he sexually assaulted them separately between 2007 and 2010.
Both women said they were inspired to come forward after former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strass-Kahn was accused of attempting to rape a hotel maid in New York earlier this month.
"When I see that a chambermaid was capable of taking on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I tell myself I don't have the right to stay silent," one of the woman, who was not identified, told Le Parisien newspaper.
"Other women may be suffering what I suffered. I have to help them. We must break this code of silence," she said.
Once prosecutors finish examining the womens' claims, they can decide whether to pursue or drop a case against him.
Tron said he quit because he didn't want to be a burden to the government, but insisted he was innocent.
He slammed the accusations as a "personal vendetta" by the women, who he says were fired from their city jobs for fraud and unfit behavior.
He also took aim at Sarkozy's political rivals, saying they were trying to capitalize on the Strauss-Kahn case.
"I am not naive. They are trying to echo what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic," he told the AFP.
Strauss-Kahn, a member of the Socialist Party, was seen as Sarkozy's main opponent in next year's elections.
Both women, who are 34 and 36, said that the attacks took place while Tron was giving them foot massages at the town hall in Draveil.
Tron is a well-known practitioner of reflexology, a therapeutic treatment that involves massaging certain areas of the feet and hands.
His passion for the technique has earned him the nickname "the foot fetishist" and the "Chinese masseur," and one minister told the The Telegraph that he has massaged "a thousand" women's feet in the past.
A statement from Prime Minister Francois Fillon's office praised Tron for his "courage" and said he was acting in the general interest by quitting.
Tron's lawyer, Olivier Schnerb, said the accusations were "unjust" and that Tron was considering suing the women for "malicious slander."
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French officials opened a probe last week against George Tron, a junior civil service minister and mayor of the southern Paris suburb of Draveil, after two women said he sexually assaulted them separately between 2007 and 2010.
Both women said they were inspired to come forward after former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strass-Kahn was accused of attempting to rape a hotel maid in New York earlier this month.
"When I see that a chambermaid was capable of taking on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I tell myself I don't have the right to stay silent," one of the woman, who was not identified, told Le Parisien newspaper.
"Other women may be suffering what I suffered. I have to help them. We must break this code of silence," she said.
Once prosecutors finish examining the womens' claims, they can decide whether to pursue or drop a case against him.
Tron said he quit because he didn't want to be a burden to the government, but insisted he was innocent.
He slammed the accusations as a "personal vendetta" by the women, who he says were fired from their city jobs for fraud and unfit behavior.
He also took aim at Sarkozy's political rivals, saying they were trying to capitalize on the Strauss-Kahn case.
"I am not naive. They are trying to echo what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic," he told the AFP.
Strauss-Kahn, a member of the Socialist Party, was seen as Sarkozy's main opponent in next year's elections.
Both women, who are 34 and 36, said that the attacks took place while Tron was giving them foot massages at the town hall in Draveil.
Tron is a well-known practitioner of reflexology, a therapeutic treatment that involves massaging certain areas of the feet and hands.
His passion for the technique has earned him the nickname "the foot fetishist" and the "Chinese masseur," and one minister told the The Telegraph that he has massaged "a thousand" women's feet in the past.
A statement from Prime Minister Francois Fillon's office praised Tron for his "courage" and said he was acting in the general interest by quitting.
Tron's lawyer, Olivier Schnerb, said the accusations were "unjust" and that Tron was considering suing the women for "malicious slander."
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Beauty queen Katya Koren stoned to death by Muslims for being in pageant
A would-be teen beauty queen was stoned to death after her participation in a Ukranian pageant reportedly infuriated local Muslim youths.
Katya Koren, 19, was targeted by three fellow teens who said her seventh-place finish in the beauty contest was a violation of Muslim laws, according to British newspaper reports.
One of the suspects, identified as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev, told authorities that he had no regrets about the stoning because the dark-haired Koren "violated the laws of Sharia."
The teen's battered body was found buried in the forest near her village in the Crimea section of the Ukraine. She had disappeared a week earlier.
Koren, described by friends as a stylish dresser, finished seventh in the beauty pageant. The British newspapers said the girl, just like her attackers, was a Muslim.
Stoning became a major international issue last year when an Iranian woman was sentenced to die by the barbaric method after her conviction for adultery.
The woman had killed her abusive, drug-addicted husband - and was sentenced to serve 10 years for the killing. The adultery charge carried the death penalty.
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Katya Koren, 19, was targeted by three fellow teens who said her seventh-place finish in the beauty contest was a violation of Muslim laws, according to British newspaper reports.
One of the suspects, identified as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev, told authorities that he had no regrets about the stoning because the dark-haired Koren "violated the laws of Sharia."
The teen's battered body was found buried in the forest near her village in the Crimea section of the Ukraine. She had disappeared a week earlier.
Koren, described by friends as a stylish dresser, finished seventh in the beauty pageant. The British newspapers said the girl, just like her attackers, was a Muslim.
Stoning became a major international issue last year when an Iranian woman was sentenced to die by the barbaric method after her conviction for adultery.
The woman had killed her abusive, drug-addicted husband - and was sentenced to serve 10 years for the killing. The adultery charge carried the death penalty.
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