MUNICH (02/11/2000) - U.S. President Clinton plans to hold a meeting next week with leading high-tech executives to discuss Internet security, in the wake of the rash of recent hacker attacks on large U.S. Web sites, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal.
Clinton as well as Attorney General Janet Reno, Commerce Secretary William Daley and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger will meet next Tuesday with around 20 Internet executives to discuss how to limit the Internet's vulnerability to attack, the article said.
The meeting is being organized by the U.S. National Security Council, and representatives from companies including eBay Inc., Yahoo Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are believed to have been invited, according to the WSJ article.
White House officials could not be immediately reached for direct comment.
Separately, the U.S. Department of Defense has also reportedly ordered more than one million of its U.S. military computers to be checked to make sure they had not been tampered with by hackers as a precautionary measure, the WSJ said in its article.
Company Web sites, including those of Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com Inc., ETrade Group Inc. and technology news site ZDNet have been targeted for hack attacks over the past week. The hackers used a method called denial of service, in which a malicious party bombards a Web site with so much traffic that it grinds to a halt or crashes.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has already said it is looking into whether one group is behind the attacks. [See "FBI to Investigate Web Attacks," Feb. 9.]