Mixter: A hunted hacker

A hacker, who wrote one of the programs thought to be responsible for last week's Web attacks is being sought by the FBI for questioning, said a source knowledgeable with the investigation.

While the source, who asked to remain unidentified, could not say why the FBI wanted to speak with the self-proclaimed "white hat" hacker known by the handle of "Mixter," the coder did write a program known as the Tribe Flood Network, which could have been used in last week's Web attacks.

In a interview with ZDNN, Mixter denied any involvement in the attacks, saying that he created the program to highlight just the weaknesses that were exploited last week. "I decided to write TFN and post the source code publicly to security sites, so people could scrutinise the code, and possible upcoming attack methods, and come up with a patch," said Mixter. "This is the security concept known as 'full disclosure.'"

On Friday, Mixter posted guidelines for security administrators to deal with, what are known as, distributed denial of service attacks, like the ones that brought down Yahoo!, CNN, Amazon.com and others for hours at a time last week.

That type of attack floods sites with a deluge of data and requests for access, leaving them slow to -- or unable to -- respond to legitimate access attempts.

While the FBI would not comment on the case, at present, Mixter resides in Germany.

For full coverage see the Denial of Service Roundup.

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