The Feds have zeroed in on unnamed locations in California and Oregon in connection with the Tuesday attack on CNN.com, the news agency reported Friday.
According to CNN, a University of California at Santa Barbara network administrator revealed that a server at the university was compromised and used in at least one of the attacks against major Web sites this week.
The FBI declined to corroborate CNN's story.
"We are not confirming the CNN report at all," said a representative for the FBI. "All we are saying is we just continue to investigate vigorously."
UCSB administrator Kevin Schmidt said that someone accessed the campus server at least twice to install a software package designed to carry out an attack by sending out connection requests to CNN.com in a typical "denial of service" attack. The problem was discovered late Tuesday night when Schmidt, checking from home, saw something fishy in the university's computer traffic
In a press conference on campus Friday, he told reporters that there is no indication that the attack originated from anyone in the university.
Meanwhile, the FBI has reportedly detected the first so-called zombie agent used in at least one of the denial of service attacks this week. A zombie is a machine taken over by a person or group from a remote location.
The computer was discovered in Berlin with a Web-based scanning tool developed by Network Associates, according to spokeswoman Andrea Iraheta.
The FBI declined to comment on that report.
The zombie was a member of the Tribe Flood Network strain, and the impaired system has been removed from the Internet, according to Network Associates.
