Data Communications © CMP media Inc. 1999

Kosovo Crisis Imperils Corporate Nets, Expert Warns

By Christine Zimmerman (Chicago)

April 14 1999 - Security experts are warning corporate networkers to be watchful in the wake of an attack on a NATO Web server two weeks ago. Serbian sympathizers with a knack for the hack apparently disabled a server in Brussels, Belgium, and one security expert thinks corporations may also be targets. "We could be looking at cash machines going down, or utility companies all losing their computer systems at once. The threat is very real, very significant,"says Diwakar Matai, managing director of e-commerce vendor mi2g (London).

He warns of four specific attacks: denial of service, or any attempt to bring a network down; general hazards, or any attempts to harm users on a network or to gain access to money controlled by the network; piracy, or attempts to copy sensitive information from a network without permission; and surrogacy, or attempts to hide in a network under a false user name or account number.