Officials Identify 1 Computer Site
Published: February 12, 2000
Another university's computer system was identified yesterday as a conduit in the attacks earlier this week that blocked several leading Web sites, but network officials and law enforcement authorities reported no new attacks.
The development came as President Clinton called a summit on Internet security for next week.
Network administrators at the University of California at Santa Barbara said in interviews that they had found evidence that software had been remotely planted in a campus desktop computer that may have been used in an attack on Tuesday against CNN.com, the Web site of the Cable News Network.
''Late Tuesday night we discovered signs of anomalous network traffic,'' said Kevin Schmidt, a campus network administrator. ''On Wednesday morning we figured out we had at least some role in the CNN denial of service attack.''
On Thursday, a computer security official at Stanford University said the computer system there was also used as a conduit in blocking access to Web sites by overwhelming them with data.
CNN reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was focusing on undisclosed locations in California and Oregon as the source of the attack on its Web site. But F.B.I. officials in Washington and on the West Coast would not confirm the report.
Mr. Clinton's summit is expected to boost cooperation in a young industry that is growing quickly and has not made security a high priority. The industry, in turn, wants to give advice to federal regulators seen as too unsophisticated in the ways of the Internet.
Mr. Clinton warned people not to expect that Tuesday's summit would come up with an ''instantaneous solution.''