Thursday, February 10, 2000
Area firms work to secure Web sites
But hackers called 'fact of life' on Net
BY JOHN ECKBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The e-mail assault on the titans of e-commerce continued Wednesday and sent local Web development firms and clicks-and-mortar companies scrambling to protect sites from similar attacks.
Broadwing Inc., the newly formed company created from the merger of Cincinnati Bell Inc. and IXC Communications, has weathered three similar incidents within the past six months, said Robert Pickering, director/engineering for ZoomTown.com, the Internet access arm of the firm.
“None were e-mail,” he said. “All were network-related, and all were handled without customer impact.”
ZoomTown is the largest local Internet provider, so the company expects attempted assaults from hackers, known by technicians as “denial of service attacks,” Mr. Pickering said.
The challenge for many companies is to offer accessibility for would-be customers — particularly when many are still wary of shopping online — yet keep systems secure enough to stop a malicious wave of e-mail that can overwhelm routers, which are computer server traf fic controllers, with meaningless data.
As federal officials vowed to find and prosecute hackers, local specialists doubted much relief would be found from hackers anytime soon.
“It is a fact of life on the Internet,” Mr. Pickering said.
National Internet disruptions started with an attack by computer hackers on the popular Web portal Yahoo! Monday and spread to eBay, Amazon.com, Buy.com and the Web sites of the cable channel CNN on Tuesday.The apparently coordinated attacks spread to ETrade, ZDNet and other major sites Wednesday.
All the disrupted sites appeared to be operating normally around midday Wednesday.
To guard against assaults, Mr. Pickering advised companies with an Internet presence to make sure that:
• E-mails are not relayed to other servers. “Only accept incoming mail if it is addressed to somebody on the network,” he said. “Only accept outgoing mail if it is coming from somebody on the network.”
• Look for spikes in traffic. Sudden increases in volume can signal that an assault is
about to begin. “If you don't catch it in time, it tends to snowball and escalate,” he said.
• Have a network operations team to monitor servers, which are the first to fall.
“I imagine a lot of companies today are watching Yahoo and Amazon.com very closely,” said Mark Richey, chief executive of Synchrony Communications Inc., a software firm that merges on the Web a company's phone, e-mail and fax communications.
“Those are big targets, and the attacks highlight the risk that people and companies face from online business,” he said.
Spamming a company's computers into submission severs the e-commerce lifeline to paying customers and is clearly a criminal act that should have serious consequences, said Brett Wernicke, senior application developer for ViewSource Media of Union Township, Butler County.
“It can't be just a slap on the wrist,” he said.
Mr. Wernicke, who developed the online taxation Web site for Minnesota before joining ViewSource late last year, said many companies are likely to install more network security safeguards as a result of the attacks.
Jim Elkin, chief technology officer at Bridge Integrated Communications, downtown, said the company doesn't look for a software solution in the near future.
“There is not much you can do on the Web site development side to avoid these attacks,” he said. “It's a hardware networking issue.”
The advertising agency has developed or maintains more than 100 Web sites for a roster of clients that includes the Procter & Gamble Co., Diners Club and Thompson RCA.
“We are looking at sites to determine how vulnerable we are,” he said.
Evolv Adaptive Technology of Evendale specializes in encryption and security, but executives there said companies have few guarantees against vandals looking to disrupt business at the network entry or portal level.
The firm offers clients its Skipjack Merchant Services, a highly secure electronic transaction processing network that manages credit card transactions for companies like Monster.com, the Ohio Department of Treasury and Lockheed-Martin.
“I'm not real sure how anybody in this space gets around the fact that if you throw enough garbage at a system, the system has to deal with that garbage, and it's taking time away from processing,” said George Farnell, chief technology officer at Evolv.
“It's a balancing act. The easier something is to use, the less secure it will become.”
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