SAN FRANCISCO (02/13/2000) - A few years ago, when the White House tried to meet with technology leaders to discuss the nation's critical telecommunications infrastructure, it was hard to find takers.

But this week, after a series of high-profile cyberattacks on a Who's-Who of Web sites, next Tuesday's White House Internet security summit is a must-attend event for the business community.

The White House has asked about 20 different companies - including some of the victims of recent attacks reportedly, such as eBay and Yahoo - to discuss the overall public-private plan to combat future attacks. The meeting, which reportedly will also include such technology heavyweights as IBM, Cisco and Microsoft, will be attended by the President, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Attorney General Janet Reno, and Commerce Secretary William Daley, among others. It will be followed by a Feb. 22 retreat on cybersecurity of the National Partnership for Critical Infrastructure Security, with about 200 expected to attend.

A Cisco spokesman confirmed that the company will have a senior executive present at the meeting.

"We look forward to attending," said Cisco spokesman Kent Jenkins. "As an industry leader in providing security solutions, we're anxious not only to share with others in the industry what technical solutions we have to help the technology community devise its own solutions, but to be part of the effort to help provide an Internet community response to any sort of hostile action."

It may have taken the worst cyberattack on e-commerce companies to date to convince the business community that the government is unable to prevent such large-scale attacks alone.

"It is, in the end, the private sector that must take care of itself," said James Adams, CEO of iDefense, a computer security company in Northern Virginia.

"The government has traditionally been in the role of leader and fixer in the national security context. But the private sector is driving the revolution.

The private sector has a mechanism for understanding what is happening, finding out what the bad guy did and making sure it doesn't happen again."

Not everyone believes the private sector will step up to the plate. "Yes, the CEOs will love having their picture taken with President Clinton, but [the summit is] put on for show," said Ira Winkler, president of the Internet Security Advisors Group, a Maryland-based computer security firm. "The government has this head-in-the-sand attitude that companies will do it just because it's the right thing to do. But companies aren't going to spend the money or devote the resources needed to secure their systems unless they're forced to."

What's needed, Winkler says, are new laws akin to building and automobile safety codes to compel the private sector to secure their systems.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation Wednesday launched a probe into attacks this week on Yahoo, Buy.com, eBay, Amazon.com, ZDNet, ExciteAtHome and the news site CNN.com. Authorities still have little information on who or what has been behind the attacks. They are believed to be caused by distributed denial of attack tools that are so widely available over the Internet an FBI expert said even a 15-year-old could launch them.

But business has been reluctant to work closely with the bureau in the past.

"Private sector distrust of the FBI is very high," said Jim Dempsey, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. "They're a law enforcement agency; their primary mission is arrest and prosecution.

They're good at investigating crimes, but it's really impossible for them to play a role in Internet security. They didn't build the Internet, they don't run it, and they're not building the next generation."

The administration has been sounding the alarm for some time on the issue of Internet vulnerability. The President has proposed $2 billion for the 2001 fiscal year for cybersecurity, with most of that targeted for the Pentagon.

Earlier this year, the administration unveiled a long-overdue national plan for guarding the nation's computer systems. The plan included establishing a central intrusion-detection network and create a scholarship program to education and recruit budding information technology experts for the government. A government report, issued last October, concluded the government's computer infrastructure remains dangerously vulnerable to attack from a variety of threats - terrorists, computer viruses and saboteurs.

At the White House Friday, spokesman Joe Lockhart told reporters, "There's a lot of interest and concern in the Internet community, both people who use it now as part of their daily lives and those who make it their business, so we thought it was appropriate to bring the group that's been working on this with the president back together and see where we are," according to Reuters.