Pentagon promises checks while EU works on cybercrime guidelines

The US Defence Department plans to check all of its computers with Internet access to ensure they were not used as unwitting agents in the attacks on a raft of ecommerce sites this week.

A Pentagon spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest that the department's one million machines had been involved, but that it would check their hard disks for "distributed denial this week of service" daemons anyway just in case.

The daemons were used by hackers earlier this week to disrupt the portal and ecommerce services of companies such as Yahoo and eBay. The small software programs can be hidden on third party machines before being triggered from a remote location to launch simultaneous attacks on a single target.

At the same time, it also came to light that European Union (EU) regulators plan to issue non binding guidelines to member states before the summer about fighting Internet related crime.

The guidelines will emphasise that Internet Service Providers need to offer effective security mechanisms to their customers and to use the latest technology, including encryption, to combat cybercrime.

Although such criminal issues lie outside of the legislative remit of the EU, the body hopes the guidelines will help make national efforts to deal with such crime more coordinated and effective.