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CERT Says No Cyber-Terrorism Accompanied Attacks

NIPC and Network Associates' AVERT teams also report little, if no activity Tuesday in the form of DoS attacks, viruses or worms.

September 12, 2001
By Michael Singer: More stories by this author:

The terrorist attacks that destroyed three World Trade Center buildings and part of the Pentagon does not seem to have been extended to the Internet, according to federal reports.

Officials with CERT Coordination Center and the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) both say there were no abnormal denial of service (DoS) attacks, viruses or worms unleashed on American Web sites Tuesday.

"We are not seeing any increase in online incidents or DoS attacks today," says CERT spokesperson Bill Pollak."

Malicious hackers sometimes use DoS attacks, like the Code Red attacks last month to jam servers and plague Web sites rendering them nearly unusable by users. E-mail viruses, Trojans and worms are also employed by cyber-terrorists to snarl HTTP traffic.

But, the people responsible for Tuesday's assaults on U.S. buildings seemed to have left American Internet sites alone.

Scientists with Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team (AVERT), the anti-virus research division of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Network Associates, say the country's networks were not direct targets on Tuesday.

"We did see a slight increase in the number of 'Magistr.a' e-mail based viruses, says McAfee AVERT senior director Vincent Gullotto. "But that might also be due to the huge amount of e-mail being sent in the last two days."

Several companies focused on the Internet's traffic flow also reported high traffic to news sites and e-mail servers, but little else.

For example, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Exodus Communications, Tuesday says its 44 Internet Data Centers (IDCs) worldwide are "continuing operations with no interruption of service."

The company says it has beefed up its security procedures and installed extra back up energy supplies in case the worst should happen.

Other Internet backbone companies like Sprint , Level 3 Communications and SBC Communcations also reported similar security measures and success in keeping the Web moving along.






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