Expert: Attacks 'have to be' connected

The outages at several major Internet sites Monday and Tuesday "have to be" the result of a coordinated effort at sabotage, a well-known computer security expert declared late Tuesday night. "I don't see how they couldn't be," said Stuart McClure, the president of chief technology officer at Ramparts Security Group LLC in Irvine, California.

"The symptoms are all the same, the effects are all the same -- every time I talk to people [at the afflicted sites] they all say the same things." McClure was referring to sites such as Yahoo!, eBay, Buy.com, Amazon.com and CNN.com, which have all been knocked out of service during the past two days by so-called denial-of-service attacks.