02/24/00- Updated 06:25 PM ET

Another Web site attacked National Discount Brokers blames 70-minute outage on hackers

NEW YORK (Bloomberg) - National Discount Brokers Group. said a 70-minute outage on its Web site Thursday was caused by [a] hacker[-generated denial of service attack] similar to the attacks on other sites earlier this month.

Special report on Web security Talk about Internet security Internet brokerage NDB noticed its site was running slowly early Thursday morning, and the site shut down completely at about 1 p.m. ET, according to Dennis Marino, chairman of NDB.com. The site was down for about 70 minutes, Marino said.

''It appears as if there were several automated significant requests for information,'' Marino said. ''It has all the earmarks of the denial of service hype.''

Denial of service attacks, like the ones launched against Yahoo! Inc., eBay Inc., ETrade Group Inc. and others earlier this month occur when Web sites are overloaded with frivolous inquiries from other computers.

''This pattern is consistent with other denial of service attacks we've seen,'' said Gene Schklar, vice president of public services at Keynote Systems, which tracks Web site performance.

No customer account information was jeopardized in the attack, Marino said. NDB has notified the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Association of Securities Dealers and the FBI.

The shares rose $3.31, or 9%, to $36 in New York, after rising as much as 14% earlier.

[Separately, Reuters reported that Microsoft's Web site was hit with a denial of service attack on Tuesday. The site experienced some restricted access but no major outage.]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cth439.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 25, 2000