World Economic Forum System Hacked

G E N E V A, Feb. 4 -- The World Economic Forum said today hackers managed to breach its computer system during its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

The Forum does not yet know who the hackers were, or howthey obtained credit card information on some of its members andguests. It is treating the matter as a crime.

This year's attendees included Microsoft Corp. founder BillGates, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and Japanese PrimeMinister Yoshiro Mori.

"We do take this very seriously, and we are going to beinvestigating this aggressively," Charles McLean, the forum'sDirector of Communications and Public Affairs, told Reuters. "We at this point have no idea how this information got out.If they could have a security breach at the Pentagon and theycan have a security breach at the State Department, it ispossible to have a security breach at the World Economic Forum."

Security Tight Outside Conference

McLean confirmed a report about the breach in the SwissSunday newspaper Sonntags Zeitung but declined to speculate onwhether he thought hackers were connected to theanti-globalization protests. He said he learned of the securitybreach after being contacted by the newspaper.

The Davos conference is not only a magnet for politiciansand business leaders, but also has drawn increasingly largenumbers of anti-globalization protesters in the past two years.

Protesters were kept away from the conference this year byextremely tight security, but staged marches in some othercities, including Swiss business and banking center Zurich.

McLean said the paper had been contacted by hackers whoshowed it the information, which he said might have been takenfrom the Forum's sign-up center in the alpine resort of Davos.

The information in the Davos computer is kept separate fromthe Forum's main server at its headquarters in Geneva.