Yahoo! falls to hackers

NEWS The Yahoo! Web directory service was brought to a halt for three hours yesterday after hackers subjected the site to a heavy denial-of-service attack. According to reports, the problems began at around 1:45pm EST (6:45pm GMT) and it took technicians most of the day to restore full service to customers. The Yahoo! site is generally considered one of the more robust Web services, with around 465 million page requests per day. A spokeswoman for Yahoo! UK & Ireland said there had been no breach in network security and user details had not been at risk. "Under normal circumstances we are equipped to handle this sort of attack but last night was particularly intense. "We've taken measures to make sure it doesn't happen again," she said. Denial-of-service attacks are not intended to breach computer systems, but cause disruption by bombarding servers with repeated requests.