On February 7, 2000, and continuing in the following days, six of the most popular sites on the World Wide Web were brought to a stand-still by a concerted effort of computer hackers. The attack started with Yahoo! on Monday. Buy.com, Ebay, CNN.com, and Amazon.com were hit on Tuesday, and ZDNet reported that it was the latest victim of the hackers on Wednesday morning. Each of the sites has...

Periodically a series of "important messages" about new email viruses make their way through various mailing lists. While savvy Internet users can usually immediately spot these hoaxes, they can be both intimidating and frightening to neophytes (not to mention the bandwidth wasted when the messages are passed on to other users.) One of the better sites that track both email and other computer...

During the final weeks of July, a computer worm known as Code Red spread to over 350,000 computers on six continents. The two sites listed above provide details and analysis of the worm incident. This site, from University of California's Cooperative Association for Internet Data analysis (CIDA), provides a wealth of data on the origin and spread of Code Red. A neat feature is the animation of the...

The Safe Internet Programming group at the Princeton University Department of Computer Science in 1996 published a paper on the practice known as "web spoofing," through which an attacker intervenes between an end-user browsing the Web and real Web sites. The attacker sets up a shadow copy of the Web, and as users request pages from sites they will receive pages from the attacker's site instead....

This handy little application is designed to protect users' DSL or cable-connected PC from hackers. This edition of Zone Alarm includes four security services: a firewall, an application control, an Internet lock, and zones. All told, these four services allow users to control which traffic enters their computer and afford individuals the ability to monitor all activity on their computer as well....