(February 9 – 10:55 ET) – Online broker, E*Trade, is the latest victim of a hacker onslaught. In the last few days, co-ordinated hacker attacks have frozen web sites of some of the world’s biggest online commerce players. Hackers have flooded them with a slew of phony web traffic.

E*Trade, one of the premier online brokerages in the U.S., is the first financial industry firm to be hit. The attack left their services inaccessible to a small number of clients. The firm says it has rerouted traffic around the attack point. The Canadian site does not appear to be affected.

Attacks of this sort were first reported on Monday when Yahoo! Inc. was taken down for about three hours. Yesterday, web retailers Amazon.com, EBay.com, and Buy.com were hit. Later a similar attack hit the media site CNN.com.

So far investigators, including the FBI, have been unable to unearth the source of the attacks – or stop them. Investigations are ongoing.
-IE Staff