Hack attacks take new tack

Security experts are warning of a new style of attack designed to overwhelm U.S. commercial and governmental computer sites.

Speaking at the National Information Systems Security Conference, the experts say they have seen a rise in "distributed coordinated attacks" during the past six weeks.

The new threat is particularly effective against security measures deployed to stop denial-of-service attacks.

Typically, a denial-of-service attack uses a single server to attempt to tie up a network's Web connection, denying its users Internet access. Distributed coordinated attacks, however, use hundreds or thousands of servers, "co-opted by a malicious programmer to tag-team a single server," according to the article posted at www.zdnn.com .