And the beat goes on. Who will be next? Maybe I should wait till the end of the day and make a list. WIRE:02/09/2000 11:24:00 ET Web broker Datek apparent victim of hackers NEW YORK (Reuters) - Datek Online Holdings Corp., the No. 4 U.S. online broker, Wednesday said its Web site crashed for 35 minutes as it became the latest apparent victim of computer hackers that have wreaked havoc across the Internet this week. Meanwhile, the CNBC television business channel and investors posting messages on Yahoo Inc.'s message board reported that E+Trade Group Inc., the No. 2 U.S. broker, was also having problems earlier in the day. E+Trade's Web site, however, was back in operation by 10:30 a.m. EST , according to CNBC.

E+Trade officials were not immediately available for comment.

It was the third day in a row that computer hackers attacked some of the Internet's most popular sites such as Yahoo! and Buy.com Inc.

Datek said one of the three routers that it used crashed earlier in the day after getting overloaded with traffic.

"It seems to be related to the 'denial of service' attack," Chief Technological Officer Peter Stern told Reuters, referring to the attacks on Yahoo!.

The router was down from 9:30 to 10:05 a.m. EST before going back into operation, he said, adding that Datek customers had trouble logging on to its site as a result.

"I don't know if they were hackers, but I find it highly unlikely that someone just pulled the plug," he said.

Some Datek customers were able to log on to the site by using one of the other two routers that the broker had at its disposal, according to a spokesman.

Officials at TD Waterhouse Group Inc., which apparently uses the same troubled router as Datek, could not be reached for comment.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20000209_2114.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 09, 2000

Answers

Just heard on the car radio that the US government issued an alert advising agencies worldwide to check over a million computers for any such "problems."

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), February 10, 2000.

Corroborating info, Martin....

Online Investors Seethe as E-Trade Struggles to Keep Its Doors Open By Ianthe Jeanne Dugan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, February 10, 2000

"....Datek Online Brokerage Services also had an outage, but it was unrelated to hackers, a spokesman for the fifth-biggest online brokerage said. The system was virtually shut down from 9:35 to 10:05 a.m. because of system failures at its Internet service provider...."

Source: The Washington Post, Washington D.C.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000- 02/10/152l-021000-idx.html

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), February 11, 2000.