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To: Katie Kommando who wrote (30985)	2/26/2000 2:19:00 AM
From: Katie Kommando	Respond to of 150070

NDB users: Online Trading Halted at Broker After Site Attack, Complications 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 Thursday 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 quickly 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 Thursday 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. Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com