Hackers Hit Two More Web Sites Updated 7:37 p.m. ET (0037 GMT) February 25, 2000

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Microsoft and the National Discount Brokerage are the latest victims in the recent string of hacker Web attacks.

The FBI acknowledged Friday that electronic vandals shut down its own Internet site for hours last week in the same type of attack that disrupted some of the Web's major commercial sites.

The bureau's Web site, www.fbi.gov, remained inaccessible for more than three hours Feb. 18 because vandals overwhelmed it by transmitting spurious signals.

"The FBI has made comments they're going to find who's responsible for the latest attacks, so it's a bit of war between the hackers and the bureau," said James Williams, a Chicago lawyer and former FBI agent who specialized in investigating computer crimes.

Microsoft's corporate site was hit at about 1 p.m. Tuesday, but was able to fend off the attack without any major denial of service to legitimate users.

Attempts are made to hack or disrupt Microsoft.com fairly often, and the company has security measures in place and a team to combat any cyber assaults quickly so no servers were brought down, a spokesman said.

The National Discount Brokerage site  www.ndb.com  told ABCNEWS.com it was down from 12:30 p.m. Thursday when the site crashed until 2:30 p.m. when service was restored.

The company Chairman Dennis Marino said NDB lost about 25 percent of its usual sales due to an enormous amount of traffic from two Internet addresses  sparking concern the attack may be related to attacks earlier this month which temporarily crippled Web lords like Yahoo!, E*Trade and eBay.

In those attacks, a program was used to flood the sites with more traffic than it can handle, eventually shutting out legitimate users and forcing servers to go down. Known as "denial-of-service" (DOS) attacks it has sparked concern from President Clinton and the Justice Dept. about how to fight "cyber crime" in the 21st century.

Attorney General Janet Reno pledged to keep the Internet and e-commerce safe and has asked Congress for an additional $37 million to hire and train 159 prosecutors and computer analysts to catch and jail criminal hackers. In addition she wants to launch 19 computer forensic labs across the country

http://www.foxnews.com/vtech/022500/hack.sml

Srr also

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

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 25, 2000

Answers

Response to FBI site shut shut down

A couple of errors in the above. Maybe it time to quit this stuff. These old fingers must be starting to give out. I wonder if anyone is reading these articles?

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 25, 2000.

Response to FBI site shut shut down

I for one am reading..appreciate your posts

-- george (jones@choices.com), February 27, 2000.

Response to FBI site shut shut down

Martin and all -

We have knowledge that many people are following this board! Not only interested individuals, but major news agencies come here for quick access to links to stories, as well as state and federal government agencies. I can't list them, but I think you would be very pleasantly surprised!

Some of the major posters here have probably become very familiar names to these organizations that have come to rely upon what you do.

So, the GICC extends its continued thanks!

Jen Bunker

-- Jen Bunker (jen@bunkergroup.com), February 27, 2000.