FlashNet now serves 24 markets and has more than 140,000 customers. Leslie says he believes that only one-third of those are malicious attempts. The rest could just be customers accidentally using incorrect user names or passwords. Smaller service providers are facing similar concerns. Most are just curious script kids that have found these hacks on the Net, pre-compiled and ready to use.
Scripts are pre-packaged ways to find weaknesses in computer systems.
The hackers probably downloaded a sniffer off the Internet to break into FlashNet, Hinze said. Nobody can say for sure how large the hacking community has become or how much of it is made up of script kiddies. But no one doubts that the number of script kiddies is growing, to the annoyance of experienced hackers and security experts alike. Littman says he sees it happening as well.