"At 12:30 a.m. on Dec. 2, hackers pulled off what might have been the perfect computer crime. You can expect a host of imitators during 2009.

"Beginning early that morning and continuing for nine hours, customers who visited MyCheckFree.com to pay bills made an unexpected visit to computer servers in the Ukraine. The customers did nothing wrong; many followed a bookmark or even typed in the Web address manually, as security experts advise. And Checkfree didn't do anything wrong either. The company's computers weren't hacked.

"Instead, criminals hijacked all traffic headed for the bill-paying service by tricking the Internet's domain name server system, which links common Web site names like msnbc.com to their numeric equivalents.

"Checkfree had to send out notices to 5 million customers indicating they might have been victims of identity theft, though the number of visitors actually affected by the scam was probably closer to 160,000, according to the Wisconsin Office of Privacy Protection."