A mind-altering drug banned in Britain two years ago is being blamed for the spate of cannibal attacks in America.

Narcotic Cloud Nine was blamed for the attack when Rudy Eugene ate 75% of homeless man Ronald Poppo’s face in Miami last month.

Horrific images surfaced of the attack that only ended once police shot and killed 31-year-old Eugene.

Mr Poppo is still recovering from his injuries in hospital.

Police are now warning people to stay away from Cloud Nine – also known as ‘bath salts’ - after two similar attacks were reported.

The most recent prompted an internal memo to police warning officers the case “bears resemblance to an incident that occurred in the city of Miami last week, when a male ate another man’s face”.

The memo called the synthetic drug “addictive and dangerous” and said it was part of a “disturbing trend in which new drugs are sold in the guise of household products”.

It added: “Please be careful when dealing with the homeless population during your patrols.”

 

Rudy Eugene, 31: Ate 75% of a man's face in Miami before being shot dead

AP

Brandon De Leon, 21: Tried to bite two police officers after he was arrested in North Miami BeachCarl Jacquneaux, 43: Bit a man's face in Scott, Louisiania. Wasp spray was used to end the attackAlex Kinyua, 21: Accused of eating the heart and brain of friend in Maryland

Splash

Horror: Film cannibal Hannibal Lecter

Channel 5

 

During the latest attack homeless Brendon De Leon threatened to eat two Miami police officers and had to be fitted with a Hannibal Lecter-style mask to prevent him carrying his threats out.

He had been arrested for disturbing the peace in North Miami Beach while high on drugs and put in a police cruiser when he slammed his head against the plexiglass divider and shouted: “I’m going to eat you” to officers before growling and baring his teeth.

Miami police said they believe he was on a cocktail of drugs including Cloud Nine.

In another case, Carl Jacquneaux, 43, was accused of attacking Todd Credeur in his front garden in Scott, Louisiana, over the weekend after being upset over a domestic issue while under the influence of what is said to be bath salts.

Jacquneaux bit Mr Credeur before being sprayed in the face with wasp spray.

Scott Assistant Police Chief Kert Thomas said: “During the attack, the suspect bit a chunk of the victim’s face off.”

Jacquneaux was then said to have left the property and gone to another man’s home where he held him at knife-point and stole a handgun before being apprehended by police.

The drug, which is also known as Ivory Wave, was blamed for several deaths in Britain during 2010 before being banned. It is also illegal in Australia.

The potentially addictive drug stimulates the central nervous system and symptoms include heart palpitations, nausea, hallucinations, paranoia and erratic behaviour and is often sold in plain packaging with the contents purporting to be harmless.

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Luka Rocco Magnotta, the 'Canadian Psycho,' arrested in Berlin

Luka Rocco Magnotta was arrested in Berlin Monday after a four-day international manhunt that spanned three countries. The 29-year-old Canadian wanted over a horrific Montreal ice pick murder and decapitation of a Chinese student that he allegedly filmed and posted to the Internet, was arrested in or near an Internet cafe, Berlin police said. Montreal police confirmed they are aware of the reports that Magnotta was arrested, but said they are still in the process of contacting their Berlin counterparts. The arrest comes after French authorities said they were investigating a tip that Magnotta travelled from Paris to Berlin via bus on the weekend. “Somebody recognized him and (then) all the police recognized him,” Berlin police spokesperson Stefan Redlich told CP24 Monday. Handout (Click to enlarge) Magnotta's alleged victim is Lin Jun, a 33-year-old Concordia University student from Wuhan, Hubei, China. He was last seen on May 24, police said, and reported missing on May 29. Redlich said police were called in by a civilian who spotted Magnotta and he was arrested after police asked for his identification at about 2:00 p.m. local time in Berlin. Reuters is reporting it was an employee of the cafe, Kadir Anlayisli, that recognized Magnotta. The cafe is on Karl Marx Strasse, a busy shopping street filled with Turkish and Lebanese shops and cafes in the Neukoelln district of Berlin. German television quoted the owner of the cafe saying Magnotta was surfing the Internet for about an hour before his arrest. Redlich said Magnotta has been taken into custody without incident and will go in front of a judge Tuesday. Canadian officials are expected to start the extradition process for Magnotta in the near future.

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Rush for safe havens as euro fears rise

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Euro break-up 'could wipe 50pc off London house prices'

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Google plans to warn more than half a million users of a computer infection that may knock their computers off the Internet this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system will be shut down July 9 -- killing connections for those people.

The FBI has run an impressive campaign for months, encouraging people to visit a website that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

LONG ARM OF SCOFFLAW

An online ad scam is having some unintended ramifications: The fix may prevent as many as 360,000 from getting online. Several sites will show if you're infected:

DNS Changer Working Group: can discern whether you’re infected and explain how to fix the problem.

DNSChanger Eye Chart: if the site goes red, you’re in harm’s way. Green means clean.

The FBI website: type in the IP address of your DNS server to find out if it is infected.

Read more on how to stay safe

On Tuesday, May 22, Google announced it would throw its weight into the awareness campaign, rolling out alerts to users via a special message that will appear at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected computers, CNET reported. 

“We believe directly messaging affected users on a trusted site and in their preferred language will produce the best possible results,” wrote Google security engineer Damian Menscher in a post on the company’s security blog.

“If more devices are cleaned and steps are taken to better secure the machines against further abuse, the notification effort will be well worth it,” he wrote.

The challenge, and the reason for the awareness campaigns: Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, when the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers, the agency realized this may become an issue.

"We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get `page not found' and think the Internet is broken."

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers.

But it wasn't enough time.

A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, said Grasso, "the full court press is on to get people to address this problem." And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.

'We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands...'

- Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent

This is what happened:

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address -- such as http://www.foxnews.com -- into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie's clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.

"This is the future of what we will be doing," said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI's Cyber Division. "Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations."

Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, "we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before

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