Even the reporter appears skeptical about NDB's claim to have been hit by hackers:

"Although online brokers have managed to reduce the frequency of embarrassing outages, they still sometimes have problems with their technology.

On Feb. 18, Charles Schwab Corp (SCH: Research, Estimates), the biggest among them, suffered a brief outage because of an apparent software glitch.

Based in Jersey City, N.J., National Discount Brokers (NDB: Research, Estimates) also owns share-dealer unit Sherwood Securities Corp."

NDB.com suspects hit by hackers Notifies FBI after online trading site loses Internet link for more than hour February 24, 2000: 6:25 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (CNNfn) - National Discount Brokers Group Inc. suspected a hacker attack and notified the FBI after its online trading unit lost its connection to the Internet for more than an hour Thursday, preventing customers from buying and selling stocks through its Web site.

National Discount said NDB.com's site froze up early Thursday afternoon after the two companies that connect it to the Internet suffered technical problems.

One NDB.com customer, Josh Landess, said he kept getting error messages as he tried to log on to the site. "I couldn't get in at all," said Landess in San Diego, Calif., a self-described day trader.

Dennis Marino, the unit's chairman, said the connecting companies -- PSINet Inc. and Exodus Communications Inc. -- had yet to figure out what had gone wrong.

However, NDB said it had reason to believe that the site had fallen victim to hackers and was taking appropriate action. "This was a denial of service type of attack in which the Web site was overloaded with inquiries," said Frank Lawatsch, attorney for the company. He said the FBI had been notified about the incident.

Marino told Reuters that the unit's internal network appeared to be working normally.

NDB.com, one of the smaller online brokers with about 178,400 customer accounts at the end of November, had had a similar problem with Internet connections about a year ago.

Officials at PSINet (PSIX: Research, Estimates) of Herndon, Va., were not able to immediately confirm their company's problems with NDB.com's Web connection, while those at Exodus (EXDS: Research, Estimates) of Santa Clara, Calif., declined comment.

On Feb. 9, the Web site of E-Trade Group Inc (EGRP: Research, Estimates) jammed up for more than an hour after hackers tied up its network lines. The No. 2 U.S. online broker was one of several popular sites to be attacked. In its fiscal second quarter ended Nov. 30, 1999, volume averaged 10,000 trades per day, according to the latest available figures.

Although online brokers have managed to reduce the frequency of embarrassing outages, they still sometimes have problems with their technology.

On Feb. 18, Charles Schwab Corp (SCH: Research, Estimates), the biggest among them, suffered a brief outage because of an apparent software glitch.

Based in Jersey City, N.J., National Discount Brokers (NDB: Research, Estimates) also owns share-dealer unit Sherwood Securities Corp. TOPTOP

--From staff and wire reports

link

http://cnnfn.com/2000/02/24/technology/wires/ndb_wg/

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), February 25, 2000