An online credit card processing company grudgingly admitted Thursday that a cache of passwords apparently stolen from its own system has resulted in hacker break-ins at hundreds - maybe thousands - of other servers across the Net. And some Internet . . .
An online credit card processing company grudgingly admitted Thursday that a cache of passwords apparently stolen from its own system has resulted in hacker break-ins at hundreds - maybe thousands - of other servers across the Net. And some Internet service providers (ISPs) are angry that it took CCBill of Tempe, Ariz., nearly three days to finally admit to customers that there may be a security problem, despite substantial evidence that its clients appeared uniquely vulnerable to the rash of system break-ins first uncovered Monday.

Dayne Jordan, a partner at Columbus, Ohio, Web-hosting company CompleteWeb, said attackers appear to have wielded the user IDs and passwords of legitimate ISP customers to enter Unix-flavored servers and install software capable of logging on to an Internet relay chat (IRC) channel to await further commands. Similar IRC-controlled "bots" have been used in the past to command small armies of zombie computers in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

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