To: Jack Hartmann who wrote (2 ) 2/9/2000 11:23:00 PM From: Jack Hartmann Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Cyber Attacks : Headlining the news this week are Website outages at some of the most recognizable Internet names -- Yahoo! (YHOO), E*Trade (EGRP), CNN (TWX), Amazon.com (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), Buy.com (BUYX) and ZDNet (ZDZ). All of these popular sites are getting hit with similar attacks that flood the target with endless streams of requests and useless information, rendering the site either inaccessable or unacceptably slow. Yahoo.com was the first target of the week and was completely down for about three hours Monday. The hackers seem to be keeping an eye on the market as Buy.com was attacked yesterday, raining on their IPO parade while ZDNet was hit this morning after a positive earnings surprise yesterday. Short sellers? We'll leave the conclusions to the FBI which is investigating and will address the issue at 14:30 ET today in a press conference. These denial of service (DoS) attacks do not require the hacker to actually break a firewall or gain illegal access, but rather just send programs called pings, or information packets that seek to establish contact from one computer to the next. When a ping is sent from a false address (as is the case with hackers), the target computer stalls until finally giving up on the connection, when multiple pings are received from false adresses, it can overload and stall the target system. Even more troubling is the availability of these ping programs, anyone can download them from any number of various hacker sites on the Net. Some computer experts have been quoted as faulting the target sites for not having filters in place to block out such attacks, what they don't tell you is that even with sophisticated filters, in extreme cases the routers get so busy filtering and blocking the attackers' IP address(es), that legitimate visitors and customers are unable to gain access. Anyway, as with most unfortunate events there are some beneficiaries. Today the winners on the Street are the Internet security providers: Network-1 Security Solutions (NSSI 20 9/16 +4 5/16), Internet Security Systems (ISSX 77 9/16 +3 11/16), SonicWALL (SNWL 70 1/4 +8), VeriSign (VRSN 197 5/16 +7 7/8), V-ONE (VONE 7 1/8 +1 1/8), Pilot Network Services (PILT 31 +2) and WatchGuard Tech (WGRD 43 1/2 +9 7/8). These are stocks to watch as this hacking phenomenon attracts more media coverage. - MGbriefing.com
