Cyprus Internet attack from Europe?

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Cyprus Internet attack from Europe? July 19, 2001 Posted: 10:25 AM EDT (1425 GMT

NICOSIA, Cyprus (Reuters) -- The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation believes a data bombardment attack that crippled Cyprus Internet service providers in the past week may have originated in Europe, an industry source said on Thursday.

ISPs on the island have been targeted in a so-called "denial of service" attack first launched on July 12.

The last attack was recorded on July 18 through a Korean address and services have since returned to normal.

"We have been told the inquiry has shifted from the FBI in the United States to FBI in Europe," the industry source told Reuters. "This attack was not from a person in the United States."

Interpol was also conducting inquiries. The FBI has a special division handling Internet crime.

Cyprus ISP Spidernet said on Wednesday its servers were slowed and disrupted by an avalanche of junk data coming from spoof e-mail addresses.

The blitz started with a denial of service attack on one of its clients on July 12, then spread through the system and also affected other ISPs.

Denial of service attacks flood systems with so much traffic that legitimate traffic is slowed or halted. The attacks only serve to slow down or disrupt connections, and do not hack into networks.

The practice rose from obscure hacker lore to headline news last year when auction house eBay, retailer Amazon.com and portal Yahoo! were affected by a crippling burst of messages. U.S. giant Microsoft was also targeted in January

http://www.cnn.com/virtual/editions/europe/2000/roof/change.pop/frameset.exclude.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 19, 2001


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