Directions: There are 7 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice.

Passage 3

Experts say these programs are probably the ones used to jam the Internet’ s most popular sites: Called Tribal Village, abbreviated TFN, and Trinoo. They are Internet time bombs.

Allison Taylor of Network Associates says, "They’ re road maps for people to copy from and then you have copycat attacks over and over and over. " We found them in several places; they’ re prepackaged. The hacker downloads and hacks the program into a number of unsuspecting computers.

John Vranesevich of Antionline. com says, "That software application simply sits there dormant until a hacker has gotten a large enough collection that he chooses to activate those, and then from his machine he can activate those and point then to a specific target. "

The targets so far this week, at least, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, CNN, Buy, eTrade and zdNet. The costs are mounting.

 Philip Allingham of ZDTV says, "There’ s advertising revenue that comes from the banners, but more importantly, providing news and information out there for our viewership. They can’ t come and find out from us; they’ re going to go somewhere else. "

This kind of hack floods a website with so many requests it can’ t cope.

Sources tell CNN that Yahoo was hammered with requests at one gigabyte per second. That’ s like 104-million people dialing in at once.

The website AntiOnline posts the software publicly hoping someone will create a fix.

Richard Power of the Computer Security Institute says, "The only things you can do is secure your site well enough so that your site can’ t be used by a hacker as a launching point. "

And many failed the test.

Allison Taylor says, "For this attack to happen on all these companies, there had to be lots of computers out there that were vulnerable. "

Webmasters are in a tough spot.

Kevin Purseglove of eBay says, "The basic aspect of an Internet site is to be open and accessible to the public. "

And vulnerable to what experts are now calling hacktivists. Why do this? Best guess: acclaim from other hackers.

Kevin Purseglove says, "and if they weren’ t out breaking these sites and trying to take them down, they’ d be out tagging their initials on tall buildings. "

Richard Power says, "It could be a hacktivist or a number of hacktivists who are sick and tired of the commercialization of the Internet. "

So far all of the targets have been very large, and very commercial.