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CYBER ATTACKS
(February 14, 2000)

The FBI wants to speak to a hacker who calls himself "mafiaboy" and another who calls himself "coolio" about attacks on some of the net's most popular sites last week, including Yahoo, E-bay and Amazon.com.

Yahoo, the second busiest Internet site with 42 million visitors a month was down for more than three hours. Yahoo users trying to get e-mails and personal calendars found themselves smurfed out.

Smurfing is when hackers slam Internet sites with bogus requests for a certain Web page or information. Hackers do this by breaking into computers and planting software instructing the computer to send traffic to a Web site. The request can come from a single computer or several computers anywhere in the world. The bogus request jams the Web site, making it impossible for the real users to get through.

Most Internet companies have software to filter such problems, but the amount of data the hackers directed at the sites was too much for most systems to handle. It is estimated that Yahoo received one gigabit of data every second. A gigabit is roughly 130 million characters of standard text. It's like trying to read the alphabet a 5,000,000 times a second. Yahoo sources say they believe the attack was from more then 50 computers from different locations.

After their "success" with Yahoo, hackers began to spread to other hot Internet sites. Buy.com and CNN.com got hacked. That was followed by hacks on ZDNet and E-Trade. In an interview with The Washington Post, tech director for ZDNet said, "the attacks seem to come from hundreds of thousands of computers." Customers of E-Trade, the number two online stock broker, fell victim to the online attacks. Customers trying to trade stocks at a profit or buy stock at a discount found themselves locked out.

This could be disastrous for online trading sites that rely on quick access and security of investments. Internet trading is one of the fastest growing e-commerce business on the net. If traders are unsure of online trading, those companies can lose thousands of customers.

The effects of the cyber attacks can also travel to Wall Street, where investors could become wary of investing in Internet stocks out fear that the site will constantly be hacked.

The attacks on the Internet prompted Attorney General Reno and the White House to respond. In a press conference Janet Reno said that federal law enforcers will do all in their power to combat Internet vandalism. The penalty for a cyber attacks can include jail time and fines.

The White House which has budgeted more than $2 billion to protect the country's important computers systems from cyber villains, issued a statement saying what happened this week is will top the agenda of the National Security Council meetings being held.

On the flip side, the attacks this week have lead many to ask are we becoming to dependent on computers? Critics say that people rely too heavily on machines and technology- that whole generations are becoming lost in cyberspace.

Tell us what you think? Are we too dependent on computers? Should Internet hackers be jailed or barred from using a computer? Should hacking be illegal?

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