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. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/160373.html --- Sponsor's Message -------------------------------------- Discuss Tech News as It Happens! Keep up with the latest happenings in high tech -- FREE! http://click.topica.com/aaaa4Ib1dhr0b1uN1Ic/technology ------------------------------------------------------------ --via http://techPolice.com archive: http://theMezz.com/cybercrime/archive unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] url: http://theMezz.com/alerts ____________________________________________________________ T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less. Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose. http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01
