on. Currently, the T-3 is one of the fastest digital lines available for any person who could cast an effective attack in less than 0.06 seconds. Scary, don’t you think? Unbelievably so, attacks did come about during the Kosovo War. Serb entities attempted to overwhelm NATO computers by "ping attacks" which establish communication with a target computer and occupies its functions by continuing to stay linked and feeding the computer system information. Recently, similar attacks were made towards the online auction website EBAY, and other electronic commerce websites using the same technique. Devices, such as an amplifiers assist the hacker in resending the signal repeatedly, causing vulnerable servers to lag or crash, making it disabled for blameless users to visit the website for the information they seek justifiably. Whether or not the attempts by the user are to just visit the website or "surf" unto the information and cause a crime, it is difficult to really suspect them in committing an illegal operation or an attempt to cause major inner structural damage to the providers server until it has already been done. For instance, in 1970 Susan Nycum was director of Stanford University's Computer Facility when her office was entered by a person saying, "I think we are about to have a problem." In her own words, "What had happened was that someone from a remote terminal using telephone lines had attempted to enter the vast campus computer facility system to destroy the volume table of contents of all the data that was stored in that facility” (Nycum, 4). Luckily, an alert operator forestalled the attack and they were not damaged, but if they had been, $50,000 in 1970 U.S. dollars would have been necessary for the repairs towards the system and recovery of modified or lost data. Since then, institutions around the United States have scattered for solutions to protect themselves from unlawful intrusions and the borderless threat...
