Amazon.com, buy.com, eBay.com, CNN hacked

BANGALORE: Hackers staged more attacks on some of the biggest sites on the

Internet, temporarily shutting down CNN, online retailers Amazon.com Inc and

Buy.com Inc as well as auction site eBay Inc.

The assaults came a day after Yahoo! Inc's portal site was shutdown for

nearly three hours because of what company officials described as a coordinated

attack from more than 50 Internet addresses. It was unclear who the hackers

were, whether the companies were targeted by the same hackers or why it was

done. Law-enforcement agencies, as well as myriad groups that monitor the

Internet and the targeted companies themselves have begun trying to track down

the source of the stealth attacks. Debbie Weierman, a spokeswoman for the

Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the bureau's computer-intrusion squad in

San Francisco is talking to Yahoo but hasn't opened a formal criminal

investigation.

Amazon.com Inc. said that its site was inaccessible for more than an hour and

a large amount of junk traffic was aimed at company's computers, preventing

nearly all its customers' form making purchases.

"Amazon.com came under a denial-of-service attack," a company

spokesman Bill Curry said. "A large amount of junk traffic was directed to

our site, resulting in degraded service." Curry said the service was back

to normal within an hour. All the companies said that hackers did not gain

access inside their computers or retrieve information about their customers.

CNN said its Web site was "seriously affected." It was under attack

for nearly two hours before technicians were able to protect its computers from

the hackers.

Buy.com was hit a few hours after its shares began publicly trading for the

first time. "We were hit with a coordinated denial-of-service attack that

appears to be very similar to what happened to Yahoo," said chief executive

Gregory J. Hawkins. "A few people could get in and shop, but the majority

of traffic was blocked by this attack."

A spokesman for eBay, of San Jose, said its Web site went down at about 6

p.m., and was experiencing an attack similar to the others. "We are still

trying to isolate the problem," spokesman Kevin Pursglove said. "Our

engineers are still investigating." The company with more than 10 million

customers said, engineers were working into the evening trying to restore

service to its site.

Yahoo! Inc. President Jeff Mallet confirmed that the FBI is also

investigating the sabotage against his company and will meet with engineers over

the next few days. Mallet estimated that during the attack's peak, Yahoo! was

drowning in one gigabit of incoming data every second. "Most sites don't

get that in a year," spokeswoman Diane Hunt said. Yahoo, meanwhile,

scrambled to recover from its attack and said it too was trying to identify the

perpetrators and taking measures to prevent a repeat strike. Yahoo programmers

and engineers began searching for the origins of the requests, backtracking from

their servers to the Internet-services provider that sent the original request

from an Internet address or Web domain. Yahoo said it would try to follow the

request back to the personal computer from which it emanated.