May security highlights in the news By Peter M. Abraham May 2004 At Dynamic Net, Inc. and We Manage Servers we believe security must be a way of life when you are on the Internet. Almost daily we read about servers being hacked -- small companies with less than $250,000 per year in revenues to large companies.  Size, being a nobody, being a somebody does not matter. Here are just two highlights: Cyber Crimes by Teens Surge By Na Jeong-ju, Staff Reporter for the Kroea Times Crimes committed by teens on the Internet have been rising steeply over the past several years, despite stepped-up efforts by law enforcement authorities to crack down on cyber crime. For the first time, the number of minors who received penalties surpassed the 10,000 mark last year, amid fears that more and more youths will be exposed to crimes with expanding subscriptions to the Internet. Lack of security measures by the site operators is also one of the main causes for the surging number of youth criminals. DDoS Attacks Hobble E-commerce, Security Sites - Netcraft article Digital vandals using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are proving effective in driving e-commerce and security sites offline, and even out of business. The recent attacks show the DDoS becoming a potent weapon against sites with limited resources to defend their sites or pay over usage fees from attack-related bandwidth consumption. Authorize-It, a Kentucky firm processing online credit card transactions, says it was knocked offline for a week by a DDoS extortion scheme. The attack occurred in mid-April, roughly the same time another online card processor, 2Checkout, was also hobbled by a DDoS blackmail plot. Both 2Checkout and Authorize-It serve the small business e-commerce market. Note from Peter: Just last week, we protected a shared hosting client whose site was being attacked by multiple sources to fend off the attack.  According to the client, they believe they are being attacked due to their business growth, competitors seeking an easy to way to crush the competition (we saved the client from being crushed. Thank you.