- The New York Times ran one story on the front page - front top left, above the fold - while another fronted the Business section.

- The Wall Street Journal placed four stories on the cover of Marketplace, and one fronting Money & Investing.

- The San Jose Mercury News ran eight stories, CNET (CNET) seven, MSNBC six, TechWeb four, InternetNews three, and the Financial Times two.

Here are the bases almost everyone touched today in covering the denial-of-service attacks:

* FBI launches probe, says it has no leads.
* Experts say attacks arelikely to continue.
* Attacked sites are beefing up their defenses.
* There is no real defense.
* Sites not yet attacked are quaking in their boot files.
* The responsible hackers are keeping mum.

Wired News' Declan McCullagh scored with the best two-sentence explanation of why the DoS attacks are proving nearly impossible to trace: "These sorts of electronic broadsides typically involve scores of machines that have been hacked into and turned into unwitting launching pads for attacks on the targeted company. If a malicious hacker is clever enough, ... an investigation might reveal only that the attack originated at an anonymous dialup account."

Wired News' Joanna Glasner and Joseph B. Treaster of the Times both probed a little-discussed corner of e-business: insurance policies covering hacker damage, including revenue loss from DoS attacks. Both reporters noted that hot Net companies are reluctant to say whether or not they carry such coverage, but Glasner dug into SEC filings to report that Yahoo (YHOO) and Buy.com have stated publicly that they do not.

While most reporters contented themselves with quoting experts on the futility of defending against attacks that could have been launched by a 15-year-old, a few writers dug for deeper grokking of the problem and its eventual solution.

Both the Times and Wired News found the nearly ideal technical expert to comment on the DoS attacks and how they might be mastered. Paul Vixie, senior VP at the network service provider that supplies bandwidth to the recently targeted eBay (EBAY), told the Times' Matt Richtel and Joel Brinkley: "This level of alertness is not sustainable. We are hoping that there will be a technological or legal solution so we can go back to building our network rather than defending against attacks." And Wired News' Chris Oakes quoted Vixie on what a technical fix for DoS attacks would look like: "The fix needs to be applied ... at the access side where the source addresses are being spoofed - and also at all of the various insecure hosts that are owned by the bad guys and are being used as distribution points." - Keith Dawson

Latest Attack Hits E-Trade, ZDNet Sites
The Industry Standard

Paranoia Strikes Deep at Web's Top Spots
The Industry Standard

Net's Strength Is Its Weakness
Times
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Companies Won't Say if They Were Insured for Net Attacks
Times
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New Attacks on Web Sites
Times
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DoS: Defense Is the Best Offense
Wired

'Denial of Service' Attacks Leave Sites Few Options for Defense, Prevention
Wall Street Journal
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Web in Modern Age Is Arena for Activism, Terrorism, War
Wall Street Journal
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Doing Away With DoS
Wired

Unscathed Ask, 'Who's Next?'
Wired

A Frenzy of Hacking Attacks
Wired