SAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo said Tuesday it was meeting with the FBI to track down hackers who brought its site to a standstill Monday, although the company expects no financial impact from the incident.
"From a financial standpoint, there isn't any impact," said a Yahoo spokeswoman. The company's stock surged 19-1/8 to 373-1/8 along with a generally stronger Nasdaq market led by the Internet sector, as investors ignored the technical problem at the site.
Yahoo (YHOO), which generates much of its revenue through advertising, was able to reschedule its ad spots to other positions without a significant loss of revenue, the company said. But since an estimated 100 million pages would have been viewed during the two hours the site was down, the company could potentially have lost as much as $500,000, analysts said.
"We were contacted by the authorities regarding the situation that occurred yesterday and we are doing our part to work with them," said the Yahoo spokeswoman.
The company is gathering electronic data and attempting to trace the source of the flood of messages that swamped its site and led to its virtual shutdown. Yahoo declined to identify all of the authorities who were involved in the probe, but said specifically that the FBI was included.
"We will be sitting down with them over the next few days to discuss the appropriate next steps," the company said.
The attack has been narrowed to 50 Internet addresses, though computer security experts said it would take time to track any hacker or hackers sophisticated enough to have shut down Yahoo, one of the largest Internet sites.
The attack is called a distributed denial of service attack, which is a concerted move to inundate a Web site from many points. The attackers disguise their identities by going though a series of networks and using other computers to do damage. Since computer programs are used, a single person could have launched the attack, even though it appears to be coming from many directions.
"The FBI may be able to do some back-tracking and coordination to find out who did this," said Scott Gordon, director of intrusion protection at Axent Technologies (AXNT), of Rockville, Maryland.
But investigators need to go behind the target computers to find the command center that directed the attack and, "we're not going to get an answer in the very near future," Gordon said.
Investigators noted that computer security services have been warning for some time about attacks like the one launched on Yahoo. The protection, in such cases, is to find the source of the problem and put a block on the Internet address from entering the site. The blocker, known as a "rate filter" is aimed at putting a halt to the "mock traffic" that is jamming the target site.
Yahoo installed that protection soon after the attack was launched and restored normal service by early afternoon. Service was normal on the site Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.
See: Was Yahoo Smurfed or Trinooed?
See: Was Yahoo Smurfed or Trinooed?
