Cramped and colorless, with furniture inherited from an insurance company and a view of the highway, it seems an unlikely place for a cherubic wunderkind to do battle with the anonymous thousands who break into computer networks. Here, his X-Force of software wizards has tangled with hacker groups like Cult of the Dead Cow, devoted to making life miserable for Microsoft, and Hacking for Girlies, masterminds behind the takedown of the New York Times Web site last September. In the past 12 months alone, black hats have hacked the Web sites of eBay, Ameritech, Bell South, Packard Bell, even the White House. The break-ins have exposed the laughable inadequacy of most conventional security measures, which often fail to stop intruders armed with only the most rudimentary skills. For businesses that live and die by Web traffic, having a site disabled by mischief makers can be costly.
Experts say huge losses often go unreported, as most corporate victims want to avoid bad publicity.
Mass. He eventually disabled the network, knocking out the town's phone service and disrupting radio transmissions at a nearby airport. The stakes for consumers are also getting higher, as banking records, monetary transactions, and personal data rapidly become little more than 1s and 0s zipping through the Internet. Credit card numbers, the lifeblood of E-commerce, are particularly ripe for pilfering. Last August, two members of Hacking for Girlies made off with 1,749 credit card numbers. Once installed on a targeted machine, perhaps disguised as an innocuous E-mail attachment, Back Orifice gives hackers more control of the computer than the person at the keyboard has, according to Cult of the Dead Cow, its creators.