Word: hacker
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While the biggest hacker attack in Web history loomed like a tsunami on the virtual horizon last Monday, Alan Hannan was looking for nothing more dangerous than soda and cookies in a San Jose, Calif., hotel lobby. Like hundreds of techies who help keep the backbone of the Internet properly aligned, Hannan had spent the morning at the North American Network Operators' Group conference listening to a talk on something called denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. "I thought I knew about them well enough," says Hannan. "I didn't pay much attention. I wish...
Even more surprising than Wall Street's reaction was how much the hackers had done with so little. The kind of software used for the attack is practically public property. You can download it in the form of programs, or scripts, like Trin00, Tribal Flood Network or the nightmarish-sounding Stacheldraht (German for barbed wire). Each program can accept a kind of plug-in to make it even more adaptable, with names like Stream, Spank or Raped. "These tools have been out there for years," says Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of the hacker journal 2600. "Hackers have known about these...
...hard to find a hacker last week who wasn't in full sneer about the so-called script kiddies--newcomers who would dare commit such ignoble attacks with prefab software. "A lot of us hackers feel insulted, because it's a no-brainer," says Val Koseroski, 32, a self-confessed "old-school" hacker with a wife, a child and a mortgage. "When I was growing up, hacking was about learning how a computer operates. You always tried to push it to the edge. Kids these days, they just want to do any damage they...
...took time. About 50 were used for the Yahoo attack; more were employed in later hits. But once they were selected, activation was simply a matter of uploading bits of code called daemons, similar to viruses, which bided their time in dark corners of these remote networks until the hacker decided it was DOS Day. The attacks appeared to come from them, not him (attacks from multiple sites are hard to pin down in any case). When the "master" activates his daemons, his hands remain unseen. Technically, "the Amazons and Yahoos were not hacked into," notes Simon Perry of security...
...center is an acknowledgment that the federal government is going to act more as jailkeeper than patrolman in policing the Internet. The major leads in the case so far, which have zeroed in on a sophisticated West Coast-based cyber-vandal, a copycat in Canada and a German hacker, have been produced by either private firms or web surfers...