He said the focus instead must be on increasing security of other computers so that they cannot be commanded to launch such attacks. Once a site is targeted, one recourse is to trace the traffic back to the third-party computers and alert their administrators. The process can take hours. Even the process of determining whether traffic is legitimate uses precious computing time. The site's Internet service provider might be able to stop some traffic from reaching the site to begin with, but the traffic comes from various locations and often carries fake return addresses, so it's hard to sort to good from the bad.
Investigators also have yet to determine whether a single individual is behind all the attacks.
There's no evidence that hackers gained access to the sites' internal data. While security personnel are busy trying to block traffic, a hacker might try to gain access to sensitive data. The Web Copyright 2000 ABC News Internet Ventures.