IP: Banks warned of hacker attacks

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Banks warned of hacker attacks
>
> WASHINGTON (AP) - At least eight times, starting days before unusually 
> forceful attacks against major commercial Web sites, computer experts at 
> some of the nation's largest financial institutions received detailed 
> warnings of impending threats. Banking officials never passed their 
> detailed warnings to the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, even as 
> alerts escalated last week from the first assault against the Yahoo! Web 
> site on to eBay, Amazon, Buy.Com, CNN and others. The urgent alerts, by 
> e-mail and pager, began fully four days before Yahoo! fell under 
> electronic assault Feb. 8. They cautioned that dangerous attack software 
> had been discovered implanted on powerful computers nationwide. The 
> messages ultimately identified specific Internet addresses of attacking 
> machines. Participating banks weren't allowed to share the warnings with 
> government investigators under rules of an unusual $1.5 million private 
> security network created in recent months for the financial industry.


http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2564263717-d7e