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To: Edwarda who wrote (11325)	2/10/2000 3:34:00 PM
From: SIer formerly known as Joe B.	Respond to of 32871

Attention Sleuths: FBI Seeks Private Cyberattack Help WASHINGTON, Feb 10, 2000 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The FBI is seeking private help in solving what it calls the largest computer attack on the Internet in memory -- an assault on e-commerce sites the bureau says could easily have been launched by any teen-ager. ''We're going to need the help of everyone in the community to resolve this'' and prevent future attacks, Ron Dick, chief of the FBI's computer investigation section, said Wednesday. Attorney General Janet Reno said at a news conference at FBI headquarters that the motive and identity of the attacker or attackers are not known, though the intent appeared to be to disrupt electronic commerce. ''We are committed in every way possible to tracking down those who are responsible,'' Reno said. ''We're committed to taking steps to ensure that e-commerce remains a secure place to do business.'' Her deputy, Eric Holder, said today ''we have leads that we are following ... (but) this is going to be a difficult case to crack. It's conceivable it could be one person or one group of people.'' Holder added in an interview on ABC's ''Good Morning America'' that ''I'm pretty confident'' government computers are secure against similar attacks. Dick said vandals used ''distributed denial of service'' tools to accomplish this week's attacks. In such attacks, a hacker hides these tools, known as daemons, on hundreds or even thousands of innocent third-party computers. The daemons can be triggered later from a remote location to launch simultaneous attacks on a single target, such as Yahoo! or eBay. The attacking daemons give false addresses so they are harder to trace. The volume of attacks overwhelms the target and causes it to cease operation, much the same way that a very heavy volume of telephone calls can tie up a phone system and leave most users with no dial tone or a busy signal, Dick said. Many tools for such an attack exist on Internet Web sites, and anyone can download them, he said. ''They do not take much technical expertise to use,'' Dick said. ''A 15-year-old kid could launch these attacks. This is not something that it takes a great deal of sophistication to do.'' But since the FBI does not know who did it, Dick noted it's ''always a possibility'' that a foreign government is responsible. ''Until you get to the keyboard being utilized, you don't know what you're dealing with,'' Dick said, noting that most similar, past attacks used computers overseas as well as in this country. He could not remember any attacks that affected as many millions of people as those this week. Additionally, the FBI does not know how many innocent third-party computers were used to launch the attacks and does not know they have ended, Dick said. Agents are starting from victim computers and tracking the attacks back through the Internet service providers that delivered the attacking daemons. Dick likened it to tracking a trail left by bank robbers from the bank to their hideout. Tom Burke, of the General Services Administration, said no attacks had been traced thus far to government computers. Dick urged the private sector to report any attacks promptly so tracing can begin quickly. And he urged private Internet sites to keep logs of traffic, install any tools developed to thwart such attacks and keep them updated. ''The key to this is prevention,'' Dick said, ''... implementing appropriate security measures such that you do not allow your system to be used in some of these attacks.'' Over the New Year's weekend, the FBI posted tools on its Web site that could detect whether two types of daemons were hidden on a computer system. Some 2,600 businesses downloaded the FBI tools at no cost and three found such daemons. The FBI opened criminal investigations into who put them there. By MICHAEL SNIFFEN