Hackers attack China site

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Hackers attack China site Unidentified Net vandals disabled popular Chinese Web portal February 17, 2000: 5:18 p.m. ET

BEIJING (Reuters) - Sina.com, a top Chinese Internet portal, suffered a hacker attack around the same time several popular U.S. Web sites were crippled by online raids, a Sina.com executive said Thursday.

"The hackers -- I don't know if there was one or several of them -- successfully collapsed our e-mail service," said Wang Yan, general manager of Sina.com's China operations. Wang said hackers flooded Sina's free electronic mail service with countless messages on the evening of Feb. 8. The attack came in the middle of a two-day hacking spree that took down many top U.S. sites, including Yahoo! Inc., Buy.com, eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.com.

Sina.com was able to restore its e-mail service the following afternoon, Wang told Reuters. "It was clearly aimed at us specifically," he said. But he said it was unclear where the attack came from, or whether it was related to the U.S. attacks.

"It's pretty strange, I know," he said. "It's a global issue." A spate of recent online hacker attacks, including a series mounted last month against Japanese government sites, has focused world attention on Internet security.

http://cnnfn.com/2000/02/17/europe/wires/china_hackers_wg/

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 17, 2000


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