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Technology Stocks : PairGain Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve host who wrote (30007)	4/10/1999 4:59:00 PM
From: LTK007	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36349

WSJ article-but I am peeved that these articles show no inclination to be tracking down the Yahoo! poster staceyITN. That would be crazy and incompetent if they weren't.Max90 Tech Center Who Did the Hoax? SEC Seeks Answers A Day After PairGain's Stock Rockets By MARK MAREMONT and WILLIAM M. BULKELEY Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has contacted at least two companies in its hunt to establish who was behind Wednesday's hoax on the Internet involving a fictional buyout of PairGain Technologies Inc. Officials from PairGain and Internet portal Lycos Inc. said they were contacted Thursday by SEC officials, a day after the scam that briefly sent PairGain's stock soaring 32%. A Lycos Web site was used by the hoaxsters to post a Web page that purported to be a Bloomberg News site with a news article about a supposed $1.35 billion takeover. News of the fake buyout was spread via Internet message boards, causing the stock to rise, and wasn't exposed as a fraud for several hours. Expert observers are split on how easy it will be to track down the perpetrators. Internet-savvy lawyers and SEC officials say they usually can hunt down people who use anonymous screen names to post misleading or fraudulent information on the Internet. "We have had little trouble tracking people down using everything from subpoenas to old-fashioned gumshoe work," said John Reed Stark, chief of the office of Internet enforcement at the SEC. But some computer security experts say a sophisticated scam artist would be difficult to find. For instance, somebody who used a computer at a public library, cybercafe or open terminal at a college campus might be able to hide their trail. "It's nearly impossible to track them down if they're smart," says Marcus J. Ranum, chief executive of Network Flight Recorder Inc., a Woodbine, Md., computer-security firm. A savvy fraudster, Mr. Ranum says, might use a stolen credit card to establish an e-mail address at a heavily trafficked site such as America Online Inc. In the PairGain case, investigators will be focusing on the person who created the fake Bloomberg web page on Lycos's Angelfire service. The free service allows anybody to post their own Web page and store the information on a Lycos computer. Signing up simply requires filling out a brief form, including such unverifiable information as a name and address. The required information that is most easy to trace is a working e-mail address. But a Lycos official says it's possible to use somebody else's e-mail, including a total stranger's. As soon as Lycos was informed of the fraud, the company removed the suspect Web page and secured whatever information it had about the person who posted it. A spokesman said the company is happy to reveal whatever information it has to regulators when it receives a subpoena. But a Lycos spokesman says it's possible the hoaxster provided false registration information.