Attorney General Janet Reno \nWASHINGTON - Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh are due to testify to a Congressional committee on money they say they need to fight cybercrimes like last week's mass spam-bombings which jammed several high-profile Web sites.
This comes a day after President Clinton huddled with some of the Internet's heavy hitters looking for ways to tighten online security. They urged the government to show the way by making its computer systems more secure - but as though to prove the point, hours after the summit the U.S. Transportation Department's Web site was hacked. A hacker calling himself "artech" hit Transportation's chief information officer's Web page.
Meanwhile, the FBI continues trying to question three hackers about last week's attacks, without calling them suspects yet. One of the hackers, Coolio (not to be confused with the rap star), claims to have hit one of the nation's most prominent Web security sites last weekend. Coolio, APBNews says, redirected visitors to RSA Security's Web site to another hacked computer at a South American university - where a nearly duplicate hoax site proclaimed, "Trust us with your data! Praise Allah!"
The hack message also chided RSA for its earlier announcement that it worked out a countermeasure against the kind of mass denial-of-service spam bombs that hit Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, CNN, and other major Web sites last week.
The FBI also wants to talk to two other hackers, mafiaboy and "nachoman," about last week's attacks. Meanwhile, a German hacker known as Mixter, who is said to have made the software thought to be used in some of the spam bomb attacks, has e-mailed the Associated Press saying he will cooperate with the FBI probe.
Other government officials say news leaks are blocking the probe.
