Hostile hackers wreak havoc on the net

Net surfers were startled to discover that some of the web's most heavily trafficked sites were inaccessible for brief periods last week. The first company to be targeted was Yahoo!, one of the internet's largest search engines. The site, which serves an average of 465 million page views a day, was out of service from approximately 1:15 p.m. to 4:25 p.m. ET last Monday. Over the course of the week, Buy.com, eBay.com, Amazon.com, CNN.com, ZDNet.com, and E*Trade were all targeted and registered similar outages.

The attacks came in the form of a barrage of hits to a particular site, effectively knocking the site offline for an indefinite period of time. According to an ABCNews.com article, "at the attack's peak, Yahoo! was flooded with one gigabyte of traffic a second—more than most sites get in a year." Similar methods were used to cripple the other victims of attacks, rendering them unavailable for, on the average, periods of approximately two hours.

The attacks have not been traced to one particular source, but several suspects have already been identified. According to ABCnews.com, a computer expert in Germany who goes by the handle "Mixter" is potentially responsible for authoring the software that was used in the attacks on the major online companies last week. Although Mixter denied that he was the perpetrator of the breaks, he confirmed in a Cnet.com interview that he has written programs similar to those used in the attacks. The FBI has also been attempting to determine the involvement of other online figures, including a Southern Californian named "Coolio." Coolio is a member of "Global Hell," a group that has managed to hack into the Department of Defense's systems.

Several of the companies, including Yahoo!, have experienced similar, albeit smaller, attacks in the past. However, last week's attacks came unexpectedly and in staggering proportions. Although the targeted sites were only offline for a short period of time, there is still concern about the implications these attacks have for the safety and efficacy of online business and security. President Clinton will convene a summit early next week to discuss the attacks. In the meantime, many large internet sites remain wary of future threats.

— Justin Chen