You'd have thought they had blown a hole in the wall of Fort Knox and made off with all the gold there.

Of course I'm referring to the so-called hackers who managed to vandalize the World Wide Web home page of the Central Intelligence Agency last week, and the resulting news coverage of that incident.

In my recollection, the story marked the first time that an online news agency, in this case < ahref="http://cnn.com">CNN Interactive broke the story before any print or broadcast medium.

But the story itself was a bit of a yawner. Okay, so some people, supposedly in Sweden, hacked their way into the computer where the CIA homepage lives.

Anyone visiting the site last Thursday morning found the agency had changed its name to the Central Stupidity Agency. The page also contained some links that were supposedly connected to the Swedish hacker community and to Playboy Magazine. (There are two sites that have preserved the page in its hacked form for posterity: www.skeeve.net/cia and www.is.co.za/mikev/cia--hack.)

Considered to be one of the best of Web sites maintained by any federal government agency, the CIA home page usually contains links to its "World Factbook," an encyclopedia of sorts about every country in the world.

CIA spokesmen said the security breach was nothing to worry about. The computer the home page lives on is maintained separately from the agency's Top Secret computer files. The hacker attack was really nothing more than the virtual equivalent of graffiti -- graffiti that could wind you up in a federal prison for five years.

It was the second time this year that the home page of a U.S. Government agency was vandalized by so-called hackers. A similar job was done on the Justice Department's home page. This time, the hacked page was created as a protest against the Justice Department's position on the Communications Decency Act. A hacker magazine, 2600, has preserved that hack job for posterity as well.

These incidents are not going to cease anytime soon. In fact, I expect they'll increase in the next several months before neophyte hackers find something new to do. It would not surprise me if similar vandalism occurs on either the White House web site or the National Security Agency home page in the next several months. But that doesn't worry me.

What worries me is the recent attack on Panix, a New York City Internet Service provider. The service, which sells its services to an estimated 6,000 residential and business customers has been besieged in recent weeks by a torrent of false messages. The practice is known as syn-flooding and so far there is not much service providers can do to stop, let alone catch the perpetrators. And Internet Service Providers everywhere need to be aware of it.

Here's what happened. Someone somewhere, harboring a beef with Panix, created a program to send truckloads false messages that could not be processed by Panix's computers. It literally suffocated the servers, as they tried to sort all the information out, finally causing a shutdown.

The people at Panix, which was one of the country's first private Internet service providers, think they may be only the first victims of a new kind of hacker attack. There is no reason, they say, that the same thing could not happen to the big kids on the block, like American Online, CompuServe or Netcom.

If they haven't already, service providers around the country need to start sharing ideas and resources to try and defeat this kind of attack. While tampering with a Web page is annoying, it's nothing compared to forcing a server shutdown.

This is the kind of computer attack we need to take seriously, because it threatens to keep the Internet from reaching its full maturity.

Send e-mail toArik Hesseldahl.

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