The Federal Bureau of Investigation yesterday initiated an investigation into a series of hacking incidents that have temporarily shut down some of the biggest sites on the Internet in the past few days.
Yesterday, hackers attacked ZDnet, a technology news and information web site, and E*Trade, one of the largest online brokerages, was also severely disrupted. "There are tools out there that a 15-year old kid could use to launch these attacks. This is not something that takes a great deal of sophistication," said Mr Ron Dick, of the FBI's national infrastructure protection centre.
The FBI stressed that the attacks could not be halted by government action; there had to be self-policing. Computer users had to protect themselves from being the unwitting instrument of such attacks. Keynote Systems, a Silicon Valley company that monitors web site performance, detected the ZDnet and E*Trade attacks when the web sites were bombarded with fake messages from multiple rogue computers.
These incidents followed Tuesday's attacks on Amazon.com, the leading online retailer; eBay, the online auction house; CNN, the news service; and Buy.com, another online retailer that had launched its initial public stock offering earlier in the day.
On Monday, Yahoo! the biggest web site, was closed for nearly three hours by hackers. Patrick Taylor of Internet Security Systems, a computer security company, said the potential for such incidents had been highlighted in security alerts over the Millennium holiday. Rogue attack software programs were detected on computers linked to the Internet. These programs, a form of software virus, were installed without the knowledge of the computer operators.
The hacker, or hackers, behind the incidents appear to have been able to activate these programs to bombard the target computers, said Mr Taylor. In the Yahoo! incident about 50 computers are believed to have been involved. Mr Taylor warned the viruses were at large throughout the world.
"This is not a uniquely US problem." Yahoo! said it did not expect the incident to affect its earnings. But the potential for attacks to undermine consumer and business confidence in e-commerce represented a much bigger threat said Jack Staff, chief Internet economist at Zona Research, a US market research group.
No data are known to have been compromised at the web-sites that have come under attack, said Mr Eugene Spafford, professor at Purdue University and a recognised authority on computer security.
