FC: New York Post: "Cyber brats wreak havoc!"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.nypost.com/news/1038.htm
                cover story

                CYBER-BRATS WREAK HAVOC BY
                JAMMING UP THE LINES
                By PAUL THARP

                 High-tech hooligans who jam up Web sites do their
                 dirty work by stealing a forgotten tool once used by the
                 scientists who first built the Internet.

                 What the techno-thugs are doing is the same as having
                 100 million people pick up their phone receivers at the
                 same time to crash the phone system from sheer
                 overload.

                 The trick is getting all those millions to execute their
                 phone prank in unison, which is nearly impossible.

                 But Web vandals have managed to bypass using real
                 people as conspirators and instead have hijacked
                 hundreds of computers to launch jamming attacks on
                 Web sites.

                 Favorite places to kidnap PCs are universities, where
                 students tend to be careless about leaving "open doors"
                 on their PCs and because universities have large, direct
                 pipelines to the Web instead of commercial providers.

                 To jam up the works, hijackers use a pinging device
                 that was devised nearly two decades ago by Internet
                 founders as a way of conducting tests and
                 communicating with each others' computers.

                 "That was when the Internet was a gentlemen's club of
                 scientists and there was a lot of trust," said Declan
                 McCullagh, the Washington correspondent for Wired
                 magazine.

                 Times have changed and so has the technology -- for
                 both good and evil.

                 [...]

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