CYBERSPACE REPORT# 52- Feb 17th-2000 EDITION
Bill Weber
The materials found in this report were taken from a number of sources but primarily from CNN news. Most of you reading this are aware of what took place this past Wednesday when some of the largest e-commerce site on the Internet were shut down for hours by a form of hacking that is so simple and yet so lethal it could cause a whole new look at the part the Internet will play in the world commerce in years to come.
This no doubt was a trial run to see how effective it could be and since they hit some of the top e-commerce site and were able to bring such sites to a standstill for hours or more. It is evident that this is just the beginning in the effort to curtail if not eliminate e-commerce.
The following came from CNN News:
Hackers have become more sophisticated and have developed programs that automate such attacks. The programs direct tens or hundreds of computers around the world to send traffic to a specific site simultaneously. That allows hackers to overwhelm some of the most prominent sites already designed to handle large amounts of traffic.
They can secretly plant their attack programs in other people's or company's computer systems by exploiting those systems' security weaknesses. The programs remain dormant until the appointed time of attack. When hackers route the program through someone else's computer, it makes them harder to trace.
Even the process of determining whether traffic is legitimate uses precious computing time. A site's Internet service provider might be able to stop some bad traffic, but it comes from various locations and often carries fake return addresses, making it difficult to sort to good from the bad.
Attorney General Janet Reno said Wednesday that while a motive had yet to be determined, "they appear to be intended to interfere with and disrupt legitimate electronic commerce."
Investigators have yet to determine whether a single person is behind all the attacks. Analysts say that after Yahoo! was hit Monday, other sites might have been targeted by copycat hackers. As CNN has reported, the programs needed to make a denial of service attack are simple to find on several Web sites. They are ready-made programs that are easy for almost anyone to use.
Sources tell CNN some of the attacks on other popular Web sites apparently also came through West Coast universities, making it clear they are especially vulnerable.
"It's particularly difficult at universities, where there are a very large number of computers being used in research and in creative ways," said Robert Suger, professor of physics and chair of the Information Technology Board at UCSB.
As a sign of the seriousness of the cyber-threat -- President Clinton will meet with Internet executives at the White House on Tuesday to discuss recent hacker attacks, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said Friday. End of CNN Report.
As noted in the paragraph above, President Clinton voiced his concern. However, President Clinton, during the Yugoslavia War, contemplated using hackers. Go to the WEB site Clinton and Hackers for more details on that and other articles on this threat to the whole Internet System.
All of us who use the Internet on a daily basis should be concerned.
For what to day is an attack on large companies like E-bay, Yahoo and CNN could tomorrow be on yours or my WEB site.