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Reward set to nab hackers
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February 16, 2000: 7:49 p.m. ET
Internet security pioneer offers his own money to capture Web vandals
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - A wealthy Internet security executive has offered $25,000 of his own money as a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the hackers who mounted a flurry of attacks last week on popular Web sites, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and CNN.com.
Jim Bidzos, the vice chairman of the e-commerce security firm RSA Security (RSAS: Research, Estimates), said he decided to offer the reward to encourage people to come forward with information. He hopes that the federal government and private sector companies will add to his reward amount.
"I think the FBI could get a tremendous amount of leverage in the investigation if they offered a reward, so I thought I would lead the way a bit," Bidzos said in an interview with CNNfn.com. "If the collective expertise is out there, why not encourage people to come forward?"
Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh testified about the hacker attacks at a Senate subcommittee hearing Wednesday. The attorney general said the government must take action to implement national security measures to combat cybercrime. But Reno urged the private sector to become involved as well.
"We must do all we can to reach out to academia and to industry to learn the most up-to-date means of addressing complex technical issues as they emerge," she said.
Bidzos' lifestyle will not suffer if he has to pay the reward. He has made hundreds of millions of dollars from his associations with several Internet security firms. Bidzos was CEO of RSA Security, based in Bedford, Mass., for about 15 years, and he is the chairman and founder of VeriSign Inc. (VRSN: Research, Estimates), a provider of trust services needed by Web sites and individuals to conduct secure transactions over the Internet.
VeriSign's stock has risen more than 10-fold over the past 52 weeks, giving the company a market capitalization of about $22.6 billion.
RSA Security said last week that its research and development organization, RSA Laboratories, is developing a potential cryptographic countermeasure against the type of "denial-of-service" attacks that crippled the major Web sites last week. Its cryptographic countermeasure is designed to allow servers to accept connection requests normally when there is no evidence of an attack, but only selectively accept requests during an attack. 
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