The Yahoo Inc! web site, which with 17.2 million individual visitors last month is said to be the web’s most visited site, was threatened with a computer virus by a group of hackers campaigning for the freedom of fellow hacker Kevin Mitnick late on Monday. The hackers, who called themselves HAGIS, standing for Hackers Against Geeks in Snowsuits, broke into the Yahoo site and released an electronic mail message, claiming that on Christmas day 1997, the logic bomb part of the virus will become active, wreaking havoc upon the entire planet’s networks. The group said it would reveal the location of an antidote once Mitnick was released. Yahoo checked the messsage, found no virus, and restored the site to working order within fifteen minutes. Mitnick has been in a federal detention center in Los Angeles for the last three years (CI No 3,282).
