The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is focusing on California and Oregon as potential locations for hackers that attacked a raft of Internet sites this week, including Yahoo and eBay.
The FBI has already seized a computer at the University of California in Santa Barbara after determining that it may have been used to send out socalled daemons to bombard websites with fraudulent queries, so bringing them to a standstill. This type of attack is dubbed "distributed denial-of-service".
But an FBI official emphasised that the current focus of the investigation on the two western states does not mean that other locations have been ruled out as origins for the attacks.
The action came as US President, Bill Clinton, invited top executives from about 20 companies, including Cisco and Yahoo, to a White House meeting on Tuesday. The aim is to discuss long term plans about how to prevent further attacks and to examine whether existing cash being put into computer security is being channelled in the right way.
Attorney General Janet Reno, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Commerce Secretary William Daley will also be among those attending.
See also:
Teenage hacker 'Mafiaboy' - who allegedly brought leading websites to their knees in February - has been re-granted bail after he promised to get a job.
20 Dec 2000A 15-year-old Canadian youth, known online as Mafiaboy, has been arrested for allegedly taking part in the high profile denial of service attacks in February.
20 Apr 2000A security company is attempting to catch hackers by luring them into traps within ecommerce websites.
07 Apr 2000The internet will not be enough to bring the next wave of global development, says one of President Clinton's senior economic advisers.
02 Mar 2000The heartbeat of ecommerce skipped a beat with the launch of distributed Denial of Service attacks against some of the world's largest ebusiness sites. But as early as November 1999 there had been reports of intruders installing attack tools on compromised hosts.
24 Feb 2000The US Defence Department plans to check all of its computers with Internet access to ensure they were not used as unwitting agents in the attacks on a raft of ecommerce sites this week.
11 Feb 2000The FBI is consulting security industry experts to develop ways of detecting and preventing the type of attacks suffered by major websites this week.
11 Feb 2000US attorney general Janet Reno launched a criminal probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Wednesday, following a third day of attacks by hackers on major Internet sites.
10 Feb 2000Yahoo has confirmed that it is meeting with the FBI to investigate the malicious attack which closed down many of its services in the US and Europe on Monday.
09 Feb 2000The successful Var in the UK doesn't have to be limited to theseshores. Guy Clapperton takes a look at the possibilities and pitfalls ofventuring into markets outside Great Britain.
29 Apr 1996
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