WSJ(2/25): Web Trading Halted At NY Broker After Site Attack
By Lee Gomes
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
National Discount Brokers Corp. said its online trading operation was shut
for over an hour yesterday due to complications after the Web site appeared
to have been hit by a "denial of service" attack.
Customers of the New York-based discount-brokerage operation didn't have
access to their Web accounts between 12:45 p.m. and 2 p.m. EST, said Dennis
Marino, the company's chairman, though telephone trading was still
available.
Mr. Marino said the company's site, ndb.com, was running roughly half as
fast as normal for most of the morning. Technicians noticed that two
Internet locations were sending an inordinate amount of traffic to its site.
But in attempting to repair the situation, company engineers inadvertently
took the site down. And while it normally takes just a few minutes to get
the site running again, Mr. Marino said the process yesterday took more than
an hour, for reasons having nothing to do with any attack.
"In trying to avoid any further impact to our operations, we zigged when we
should have zagged," he said.
Mr. Marino wouldn't disclose the locations of the two computers identified
as sending the unusually large amounts of traffic but said the information
had been turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
National Discount Brokers is in the top 12 of all discount traders. Mr.
Marino said that when the site is the busiest, about 5,000 customers are
using it.
The FBI and other investigators are still looking into the much bigger
denial-of-service attacks launched earlier this month against Yahoo! Inc.,
eBay Inc. and other major Web sites. In such attacks, malicious computer
users surreptitiously take over scores of computers and then use them to
flood a target Web site with more Internet traffic than it could possibly
handle. The site usually shuts down as a result.
Most of these attacks have been launched from computers running the Unix
operating system, which are common in university settings, and computers at
several West Coast colleges have been identified as intermediaries in the
earlier assaults. But in recent days, security experts said they have
noticed an increase in denial-of-service tools written to run on
Windows-based computers.
Jed Pickel, technical coordinator with the Computer Emergency Response Team
at Carnegie Mellon University, said a Windows version of a denial-of-service
tool known as "trinoo" has been found on computers in multiple locations in
recent days. The software had yet to be enlisted in a major attack, said Mr.
Pickel, though he added that could just be a matter of time.
Programs like the trinoo variation are often spread around as e-mail
attachments, said Mr. Pickel, who urged computer users not to run programs
whose origins they aren't sure of.
(END) DOW JONES NEWS 02-24-00
11:41 PM |
