IP: Banks warned of hacker attacks

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>Banks warned of hacker attacks
>
>WASHINGTON (AP) - At least eight times, starting days before unusually 
>forceful attacks against major commercial Web sites, computer experts at 
>some of the nation's largest financial institutions received detailed 
>warnings of impending threats. Banking officials never passed their 
>detailed warnings to the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, even as 
>alerts escalated last week from the first assault against the Yahoo! Web 
>site on to eBay, Amazon, Buy.Com, CNN and others. The urgent alerts, by 
>e-mail and pager, began fully four days before Yahoo! fell under 
>electronic assault Feb. 8. They cautioned that dangerous attack software 
>had been discovered implanted on powerful computers nationwide. The 
>messages ultimately identified specific Internet addresses of attacking 
>machines. Participating banks weren't allowed to share the warnings with 
>government investigators under rules of an unusual $1.5 million private 
>security network created in recent months for the financial industry.


http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2564263717-d7e