JUST LISTENING TO FBI/JANET RENO ON CNN. i think i understood them to say there was evidence that it may be coming from overseas? hummmmm!

http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=63186

e-commerce apparently has been hit hard over this

-- mutter (murmur@ya.com), February 09, 2000

Answers

Link

-- Kyle (fordtbonly@aol.com), February 09, 2000.

of COURSE it would be coming from overseas!!! or else, from the FBI/CIA itself, while running a "test" of the system's robustness...

-- John Galt (still@doom.er), February 09, 2000.

Maybe it's the first phase of a larger attack? Disable the net?

Only one thing bothers me about that: eBAY, Amazon, Buy.Com, Yahoo, and CNN going down, even forever, is hardly going to hurt anyone except those companies. They already lose tons of money (except maybe CNN), so who's that going to hurt?

It's probably a few Russian hackers that are still excited about that PCjr and 2400 baud modem they got for Christmas.

-- Powder (Powder47keg@aol.com), February 09, 2000.

What makes you so sure that the hack attack is not just a public relations strategy by the big internet companies when the outages are really being caused by a series of massive equipment failures? Cisco has announced a variety of problems with their software/hardware since rollover. See this thread for more info:

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002WEk

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), February 09, 2000.

[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/webattacks000210.html

Searching For The Attackers

FBI Investigates Web Attacks; Seven Hit So Far, Who&#s Next?

By Jonathan Dube

Feb. 10  After three days of assaults that knocked seven leading Web sites offline, Internet companies are on guard and bracing to see what, if any, sites may be struck next.

Meanwhile, the FBI continues to pursue the attackers. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno tried to ease public concerns Wednesday by announcing that a team of agents is working the case.

These cyber assaults have caused millions of Internet users to be denied services, Reno said. At this time we are not aware of the motives behind these attacks. But they appear to be intended to disrupt legitimate electronic commerce.

At least seven top Web sites have been knocked offline in the past three days by an unprecedented level of attacks that have raised new concerns about Internet security.

On Monday, the leading independent Web portal, Yahoo!, was attacked and made inaccessible. On Tuesday, Buy.com, Amazon.com, eBay and CNN.com were attacked. And Wednesday, technology site ZDNet and online trading site E*TRADE have suffered attacks.

Ron Dick, chief of the computer investigations at the National Infrastructure Protection Center, said the FBI is in the process of collecting computer data logs from the targeted companies so it can try to track down the source.

We are in the process of analyzing and getting them in here at this point, Dick said.

Hunting Down Leads

All the assaults were what are known as denial-of-service attacks, which entails someone bombarding a site with mock traffic. What results is an Internet traffic jam, effectively blocking out users. All of this weeks attacks appeared to be coordinated efforts launched from multiple points on the Internet.

The attackers could be difficult to locate because they were likely relaying the traffic through computers that they had taken over without the owners knowledge. They also likely disguished their computer trail by faking identifying information.

Reno said the FBIs National Infrastructure Protection Center is heading up the investigation with help from FBI agents in the field, specially trained federal prosecutors, state and local law enforcement agencies, and officials from the companies that were attacked.

Dick said at least four FBI offices have opened investigations and agents are interviewing people across the United States.

Were running every lead down until we find the perpetrators, Dick said.

The type of attack suspected is considered a federal crime that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison for first-time offenders and up to 10 years for repeat offenders. However, the FBI could conceivably slap dozens of charges on the perpetrators because there have been so many attacks.

If the person responsible lives outside the United States, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would likely still apply because U.S. computers were used in the attacks, Dick said.

Connection Likely

Security experts say the timing and similarity of the attacks makes it likely they are connected.

I would say whoevers doing this has some kind of beef, has some kind of ax to grind, and its safe to say hes active and out there and looking for more targets, said Elias Levy, the chief of technology for SecurityFocus.com, which monitors computer security issues.

The attacks are particularly alarming to security officials and Internet companies because so far they have been unstoppable.

If somebody, such as Yahoo!, which is the No. 1 site when it comes to Web traffic and has invested a lot of money in its infrastructure to handle a lot of Web traffic, can be taken offline, then that basically means that anybody can be taken offline, Levy said.

Coordinated Attacks

Yahoo! has installed filters to prevent similar attacks. But spokeswoman Diane Hunt acknowledged that even the new filters may not be foolproof.

This was a very, very intense attack, Hunt said. And, unfortunately, theres no way to guarantee that these types of attacks wont happen to anybody in the future. You can put filters in place, but eventually hackers can figure out ways to work around those. So nobody can solve it 100 percent. I think its part of doing business, unfortunately.

Yahoo! has historically been one of the most reliable sites on the Web, so Mondays outage offers a cautionary note to anyone dependent on the Internet for business: Even the sites with the most resources and best track records are vulnerable to attacks and service interruptions.

I think its absolutely an indication that no matter how much preparation you do, no matter how many contingency plans you have, no matter how well you design your system, its always possible that something can go wrong, said Dan Todd, director of public services for Keynote Systems Inc., a Silicon Valley company that tracks Web site performance.

The Victims

Heres a rundown of the Web sites that have been attacked so far this week:

Yahoo!

Yahoo!, the first site struck, was down from about 1:15 p.m. to 4:25 p.m. ET Monday. The attack on Yahoo! came from at least 50 different points on the Internet and appeared to be a coordinated effort, spokeswoman Diane Hunt said. At the attacks peak, Yahoo! was flooded with one gigabyte of traffic a second  more than most sites get in a year. Yahoo! serves an average of 465 million page views a day.

Hunt said the site has been struck by smaller versions of this type of attack in the past, but in those cases the company was able to reroute the traffic to prevent disruption of service. Mondays attack caught the company off-guard and came from so many locations, at the same time, that Yahoo! was unable to stop it.

Yahoo! doesnt expect the downtime to cost the company a significant amount of money. The company may place additional ads on pages to compensate for any ads that were supposed to be seen Monday but were not due to the outage.

Yahoo! has had minor outages in the past, but this was the first time the entire Yahoo! network went down. Yahoo! is the second most- visited site on the Internet after America Online with more than 42 million unique visitors a month, according to the research firm Media Metrix.

Buy.com

Robin Zohn, a spokeswoman for Buy.com, said the site was down from about 1:50 p.m.to 5 p.m. ET Tuesday  roughly the same time Yahoo! was inaccessible Monday. The site was struck with 800 megabytes of data per second, more than 24 times the normal flow of data.

The timing was unfortunate for Buy.com, as the company went public Tuesday. Buy.com, which sells a variety of products at steep discounts, had a market capitalization of $3.5 billion after Tuesdays initial public offering, which raised $182 million.

eBay.com

eBay, the Webs leading auction site, was inaccessible for about two hours Tuesday starting at 5:45 p.m. ET. The company sent a note to its members saying it was experiencing a denial-of-service attack and promising that no confidential information was compromised.

We are taking multiple measures to fight this, including working with local and federal authorities, ISPs including Sprint, UUNet and AboveNet, our vendors including Cisco, our partners, and other Internet sites that have recently been attacked in the same way, an eBay statement read.

The company has had access problems in the past. The site crashed in June 1999 for about 22 hours. The outage sent the companys stock into a tailspin, causing eBay to lose 26 percent of its value in five days and costing it $5 million in revenues in the second quarter. The company also suffered a string of smaller outages in November, lasting a total of four hours during three days. It has since invested more than $18 million in engineering to improve site performance.

Amazon.com

Users were unable to access Amazon.com from about 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET Tuesday, according to spokeswoman Patty Smith.  A large amount of junk traffic was directed at our site, she said.

CNN.com

CNN.com was inaccessible from 7 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. ET Tuesday. The attack continued after that, but the sites service provider put up blocks, said spokeswoman Edna Johnson.

ZDNet.com

ZDNet was attacked Wednesday morning. A ZDNet spokeswoman said the company believes the strike came from the same group of attackers. All signs point to this being the same denial of service problem, ZDNets Martha Papalia said.

E*TRADE

The online investment site E*TRADE went down unexpectedly Wednesday from about 8:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. ET, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a Silicon Valley company that tracks Web site performance. E*TRADE said it was attacked.

The Microsoft Network

Microsoft Corp's MSN.com, another highly visited site, said it was indirectly affected because of disruptions to several Internet service providers carrying its traffic. A relatively small proportion of users were unable to access Web pages and others, who subscribe to Microsoft's online service, may have been unable to log on, said Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla.

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-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), February 10, 2000.