Last February.

Last February, a series of cyber-attacks contributeed several high-profile Web sites useless. Among them, Amazon.com, electronic auction house eBay, discount retailer Buycom and CNN Interactive were jammed at hackers with thousands of useless messages that tied up the company's computer and nearly forced the sites to lock up down for a period of time.

The previous day, hackers tapped into Yahoo! with a ???denial-of-service??? attack that forced the Internet portal to enclose down. A denial-of-service attack is a continuous stream of information sent to a target with the intention of flooding it until it crashes or can no longer take legitimate traffic.

The harm caused according to these hacker attacks to the businesses involved includes financial losse and crippling of the companies' information connected views To combat such attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the agency's National Infrastructure Protection Center have formed