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By Pia Heikkila, 28 January 2002 16:10

NEWS Cloud Nine's chief executive is working with the police in an attempt to find the hackers who drove him out of business. The UK ISP was forced to shut down its operations last Tuesday, one week after it was hit by a serious denial of service (DOS) attack. It failed to recover and was forced to sell off most of its assets. It also axed all of its six staff. Its customer base was taken over by another UK ISP, ZetNet. Cloud Nine is now waiting for forensic investigators to begin their work and is co-operating with the Hampshire Computer Crime Unit. Cloud Nine CEO Emeric Miszti admitted that he has learned a very important lesson in computer security. He said: "I have come to realise security must be a top priority. We do know how the attack was done and can now protect ourselves against it, but hindsight doesn't help us. It's too late." Gary Milo, CEO of security specialist Webscreen, said the culprit could have several motives: "He or she could be a competitor, a member of an organised crime gang or it could be a job of a former disgruntled employee. Whatever the case, the attack could have been prevented with a proper technology in place." ZetNet's marketing director, John Earnshaw, told silicon.com that his company is not worried about being targeted by hackers. "At the end of the day, we have some of the best technical guys in this country to protect us against any attacks, so I am not losing sleep over any speculation," he said. Ian Mears, a detective constable at Hampshire's Computer Crime Unit, said the police will investigate the attack as a regular crime. "We have to gather the relevant evidence just like in any other crime. Naturally we are relying on the close co-operation of Cloud Nine to provide us with full web logs and to help us to make sense of them," he said. We'll have more on this story as it breaks