Germany sets sights on hackers

The German government is setting up a specialist taskforce to deal with the threat of Internet hackers.

In an announcement this week, German Interior Secretary Otto Schily said IT security is a key problem for every modern political economy. "For this reason the federal government will take all available measures to enable IT security to be guaranteed in future," he said in a statement.

The taskforce will include representatives from the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and the Federal Criminal Investigation Office.

The move follows a recent spate of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on top name Web sites in the US. FBI investigators looking into the attacks believe some of the software used may have originated in Germany.

The FBI is now investigating a total of 17 different attacks, 13 of which were DDoS. Only eight of the victims have been named: Amazon.com, eBay, CNN.com, Yahoo!, ZDNet, ETrade, Buy.com and Excite.