Hacked Off.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff A.
• Position: Brief Article

When is a "hacker attack" not a hacker attack? When it's done by wannabes too dense to be hackers.

That seems to be the case in the assaults on several high-profile e-commerce Web sites in February. EBay, Amazon, and a few other vendors had to go offline after cyber-vandals monkeyed with their systems and clogged those sites with phony electronic traffic. While damage was done, such antics don't qualify as true hacks: The systems were never actually penetrated or turned "rogue." For the targeted sites, these attacks were more like being on the receiving end of a flurry of crank phone calls. Your line is tied up by the pranksters and people you want to talk to can't get through. Imagine you run a business dependent on phone orders and real money can be lost.

To complete the analogy, our phony callers would have broken into someone else's house and used their phone to harass you. This makes them hard to catch.

Net culture even has a term for those who engage in this sort of vandalous pseudo-hack: script kiddies. Of course, if the mainstream media were to lead their reports with that phrase, the average American might think the Net is under attack from Hollywood child stars. So hackers it is.

As with most break-ins, this sort of attack can usually be deterred with better locks. But better locks mean better security, and that means doing things that...