In a dim section of the main ballroom at the Alexis Park Hotel, hackers were trying to break into the computer systems of current stock market favorite Weiss Labs. A mix of teenagers to thirty-somethings, the hackers at the Defcon . . .

In a dim section of the main ballroom at the Alexis Park Hotel, hackers were trying to break into the computer systems of current stock market favorite Weiss Labs. A mix of teenagers to thirty-somethings, the hackers at the Defcon gathering here breathed second-hand cigarette smoke and quaffed Red Bull energy drink by the liter, their hearts beating to a techno rave track. They're a dangerous bunch, too: A hacker from the research arm of a rival company broke into the Weiss Labs server and found a flaw, causing the computer to eat up its own memory, finally crashing the system.

"They didn't get root, but they did manage to DoS us," said Crispin Cowan, head of the Weiss Labs' team. That is, the break-in didn't get all the way to the core of the server, but a denial-of-service (DoS) attack overwhelmed it with traffic.

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