Hackers attack World Economic Forum

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4710688.html?tag=mn_hd

By Reuters
February 4, 2001, 7:30 p.m. PT

GENEVA--The World Economic Forum said Sunday hackers managed to breach
its computer system during its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

The Forum does not yet know who the hackers were, or how they obtained
credit card information on some of its members and guests last week.
It is treating the matter as a crime.

This year's attendees included Microsoft founder Bill Gates,
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro
Mori.

We do take this very seriously, and we are going to be investigating
this aggressively," said Charles McLean, the forum's Director of
Communications and Public Affairs.

"We at this point have no idea how this information got out. If they
could have a security breach at the Pentagon and they can have a
security breach at the State Department, it is possible to have a
security breach at the World Economic Forum."

McLean confirmed a report about the breach in the Swiss Sunday
newspaper SonntagsZeitung but declined to speculate on whether he
thought hackers were connected to the anti-globalization protests. He
said he learned of the security breach after being contacted by the
newspaper.

The Davos conference is not only a magnet for politicians and business
leaders, but also has drawn increasingly large numbers of
anti-globalization protesters in the past two years.

Protesters were kept away from the conference this year by extremely
tight security, but staged marches in some other cities, including
Swiss business and banking center Zurich.

McLean said the paper had been contacted by hackers who showed it the
information, which he said might have been taken from the Forum's
sign-up center in the alpine resort of Davos.

The information in the Davos computer is kept separate from the
Forum's main server at its headquarters in Geneva.

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