FBI Targets 7 Hackers In Planned New Year's Eve Virus Attack

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/160373.html

By Brian Krebs, Newsbytes
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
11 Jan 2001, 10:52 AM CST

The FBI is conducting an investigation into a ring of seven juvenile
hackers - three in the US and four based overseas - suspected of
plotting a series of virus and widespread denial-of-service attacks
planned to take place on Christmas and New Year's Eve 2000, sources
said today.

No arrests have been made yet in the case, but several FBI field
offices have conducted a series of "preemptive" search warrants over
the past two weeks to keep the planned attacks from occurring, one FBI
official told Newsbytes.

"We have pretty clear proof that these individuals were responsible
for several other similar attacks that have occurred and with the way
this case was developing, it seemed very likely that their planned
attack on New Year's Eve would have occurred if it had not been
abated," said an FBI official, who asked not to be identified.

The FBI is currently wading through the prosecutorial and legal
hurdles that often accompany charging minors with computer crimes,
particularly those which never took place. Current US laws on computer
crime mandate that such crimes must result in damages of more than
$5,000 to qualify as a felony charge.

"With preemptive investigations, we can't really show how much damage
was done, so we have to painstakingly go through the (phone and
Internet service provider) records and search to see what their
earlier actions were likely to have caused," the FBI official said.

In December 2000, the NIPC - the FBI's cyber crime division - urged
system administrators to beef up security on Web servers and network
firewalls before New Year's weekend. The warning cited a marked
increase in the type of activity that often precedes distributed
denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

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