To Catch a Hacker Analysis/Commentary The plot might have been pilfered from an Eric Ambler thriller. Five scruffy thugs allegedly broke into the Symantec Anti-Virus Software Internet site last Sunday, leaving behind a nose-thumbing scrap of graffiti. Symantec restored its home page within minutes, but scrambled to investigate its network for hours. The hack proves that cyber pranksters are upping the ante. Forget NASA, the White House, or the Pentagon. When Symantec, the leading seller of antivirus software, gets hacked, nobody's safe. Hacker attacks against commercial sites are increasing, says Pilot Security Networks --doesn't necessarily mean that the clever cat burglars can get away scot-free with stealing the sultan's jewels. Rather, with cybercrime gone private, the statistical possibility that clever hoods will break into an e-commerce site, or a home user's personal computer, also increases. From a gentleman's game of derring-do, cyber-thievery is becoming a source of profits for Net-wise deviates. The experts are worried. Thankfully, the Symantec break-in was little more than a pinch on the nose. The hackers say they launched a worm (a self-activating roaming program), but the security managers at Symantec report that their products, some of which are downloadable from the Web, aren't compromised. The competition agrees, so does the Department of Energy (according to Wired magazine). The hacker group calls itself Blow. It left a page behind with text that carries the standard hackerese jumble of characters, letters, capitals, and lower case. "F1lez" are files. And "dududuh" probably means "ho, ho, ho." But whose pictures on the bottom? Is it the perps? Could anyone be so naive as to leave his passport photo? In any event, the Blow page doesn't rival for cleverness the Monica page left by "The Posse" at Brookhaven National Laboratories. Computer users -- at least some of them -- worry about security. Like corporations, they cordon off their content and program files behind firewalls to keep hackers out; others back up their files to a second computer that stays for the most part turned off. August 4, 1999