FBI Probes Web Sabotage Allegation

The FBI said it is investigating charges that sabotoge caused a 40-hour outage last weekend on Web Communications Inc., a Silicon Valley service hosting 3,000 World Wide Web sites. WebCom said it believes a hacker using a college computer network in British Columbia, Canada, flooded its server, a central computer in San Jose, with requests for connections from phony addresses. It said the attack ended Sunday after MCI Net, a unit of MCI Communications Corp., blocked telephone traffic between WebCom and CA-Net of Canada at the request of WebCom and its local service provider. WebCom Executive Vice President Thomas Leavitt said the sites the company hosts were unreachable much of the weekend, causing customers, some of which operate retail sites, to suffer “extensive” damages.