Responding to this week's spate of Internet hacker attacks, Commerce Secretary William M. Daley Wednesday emphasized the need for Congress to appropriate $2 billion for federal government computer security.
Meanwhile, the Federal Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University and the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center were launching investigations and dispensing advice to the hackers' victims, which were some of the largest and most popular commercial sites on the World Wide Web.
Victims included Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade and Yahoo. These and other popular Internet sites either crashed or reported slow service as a result of the wave of attacks. The hackers flooded their target computers with bogus messages from hundreds of computers that they pressed into service. The "slave" or "launching pad" computers typically belonged to individuals or organizations that became unwitting accomplices.
"These attacks came out of the blue for most people," Daley said during a phone briefing with the press. "The attacks have inconvenienced many people and have disrupted our growing economy."
Attorney General Janet Reno, in a press briefing, echoed Daley's call for Congress to provide the executive branch more money to fight crime online.
No federal computers have been attacked, said Ron Dick, FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, but his center has notified all departmental chief information officers to take precautions.
Daley called on federal agencies to make sure that their systems were not being appropriated by hackers and used as slaves or launching pads. But the secretary said he had no information that federal systems have been used as launching pads.
Commerce has been concerned about the threat of electronic attacks for a while. In a December meeting with 90 large companies, Daley urged them to beef up their information technology security so that they would be protected against hack attacks.
However, the sites attacked this week are believed to be some of the best-protected and most prepared on the Internet.
Because the computers that are the sources of the attacks are just stepping stones for the attackers, it will be difficult for investigators to find the hackers. They could be anywhere in the world.
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