John Montgomery Presents This Week's	February 12, 2000	Creep Logo by Alan Fraser
	The Super Hackers
	See My Crack? You've Been Hacked!

Here we go again. Every year some new gaggle of geeks sets out to win the Most Creative Hacker award. In the world of Geekdom, whoever comes up with the most ingenious, insidious, intrusive hack gets to be called Geek The Great, at least until the next one comes along. Last year Geek The Great was David Smith, who wrote the Melissa virus. But now David has been knocked off this throne.

This week, some of the world's most popular "respectable" web sites (eBay, CNN, Amazon, Buy.com, Yahoo, etc.) were the target of something called Denial of Service attacks. That is where the sites get overwhelmed by huge amounts of bogus requests for information, causing them to become extremely slow, or come to a complete halt. The bogus requests come from other computers, called Zombies, which the hackers have invaded and installed their nasty software on. The perpetrators haven't been found yet, but it looks like the new Great Geeks are in Germany.

And it may be that Geek is a bit of an understatement. The creatures who think this stuff up exist in a world of extreme geekiness. They're nerds. Worms. Weirdos. Wonking wankers. Bit-headed Bart Simpsons. Aryan asexual eunuchs. Sociopaths. Dangerous degenerates. Their report cards said, "Does not play well with other children. The other children are grossed out."  They're full of fleas, crabs and cooties. These guys make Bill Gates look like the Barry White of the computer world.

Of course, you know the motive: They do it because they can! The dream of becoming the Great Geek is a great motivator. And inflicting a little chaos and insurrection on the world is good for the spirit. The Super Hackers even managed to do something that legions of illegal presidential campaign contributors could not: Incur the wrath of Janet Reno.

That's right, our nation's top cop (and Zombie in her own right) is hot on the case. "We have been well aware that the technology has changed not only how people do business, but how criminals do business, too," says Janet, getting off a pretty good line (for her). The nation's business must not be interrupted! Besides that, for a whole afternoon, millions of workers had to perform real work at their desks instead of screwing around on the web.

Speaking of screwing around, even Janet's boss surfs on occasion. Our president, soon to be retired and hanging around an empty house all day, is busy trying to become a computer expert. If you were going to guess Bill's favorite site so you could hack it, what would it be?  The Monica Lewinsky / Jenny Craig home page? The Middle-Aged Snatch Hound Support Group? The "Why Tom Delay Sucks" web site? That picture everyone's been passing around of Hillary standing in Times Square topless? How about the Creep of the Week site? I'm actually feeling a bit left out that no one thought to target my site for a Denial of Service attack. Maybe Bill and Janet can put in a good word for me.