U.S. Web sites and Internet service providers could suffer crippling hacker attacks sometime today, the FBI warned Monday.

Citing "credible, but non-specific information," the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) urged system administrators to guard against widespread hacker attacks, possibly emanating from
Western Europe.

The NIPC alert encourages administrators to "heighten their awareness of network traffic during this period," and "to report suspicious
malicious activities" to their local FBI office.

The warning did not say whether any specific networks were at
risk of attack, nor did it identify any groups or individuals
suspected of preparing attacks.
A NIPC spokesperson said that law enforcement is expecting
"denial-of-service" attacks - designed to crash Web sites by
flooding them with a large volume of Internet traffic.

In February 2000, a 14-year-old hacker used denial-of-service
attacks to temporarily shut down key players in the Internet
economy, including Yahoo!, Ebay, CNN and E-Trade.

There have been no significant signs of increased network activity
coming from Western Europe so far today, said Chris Rouland,
director of research and development at Internet Security Systems
Inc.'s X-Force service.

Article Source: Security Focus