FBI Warns of Hacker Attacks From Europe

Online security experts were on alert Tuesday in the wake of an FBI warning of possible attacks on Web sites and Internet service providers from hackers in Western Europe. But all seemed quiet on the Internet front during the day.

“We are not seeing anything that is out of the ordinary,” said Marty Lindner of the CERT Coordination Center, a government-funded program that monitors the Internet for security breaches.

Based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, CERT was founded in 1988 in response to the Morris worm attack that shut down 10% of Internet systems.

“We get reports of attacks every day, but nothing happened that was outside the status quo,” Lindner said. “Today was just like yesterday and the day before.”

FBI officials would not say what information resulted in the attack warning issued late Monday, except to say it was “credible but nonspecific.”

A spokeswoman for the agency said Tuesday afternoon that the FBI also knew of no widespread attacks.

The warning by the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center was described as an alert, which is the NIPC’s most urgent category. The only other alerts issued this year were to warn in April of the Klez.h e-mail worm and a February disclosure of security vulnerabilities to the SNMP protocol used by Net equipment.