So far, there are few clues pointing to a perpetrator or a motive in this week's spectacular sabotage of the most popular sites on the Web. But never fear, speculation abounds -- from the prosaic "just a bunch of kids with time on their hands" to the flat-out conspiratorial: Is President Clinton to blame, or those darn DeCSS hackers?

Since we at Salon Technology don't have a clue what's motivating the attackers, we thought we'd round up the usual suspects with a brief survey of who's saying what.

The massive "denial of service" (DoS) attacks began on Monday, causing a three-hour outage at Yahoo, and have continued on Tuesday and Wednesday -- knocking out such Net heavyweights as Amazon, Buy.com, eBay, CNN, E-Trade, Datek and ZDNet for a few hours each. None of the sites has experienced anything more severe than some downtime -- a dull fact that hasn't prevented raucous headlines like "Hacker Havoc on the Web" -- but both the government and the media are treating the onslaught as a serious crime.

The FBI stormed Silicon Valley to talk with afflicted sites and Clinton said he has "asked people who know more about it than I do whether there is anything we can do about it." Attorney General Janet Reno told a news conference, "We are committed in every way possible to tracking down those who are responsible," and News.com reported that the culprit could face up to 10 years of jail time and a $250,000 fine. In a nice display of ironic recursion, ZDNet, a victim of the attack on Wednesday, ran a story headlined Deconstructing denial of service attacks," explaining how the attack is achieved and how to guard against it.

So who did it? According to the New York Times, officials "have not ruled out foreign governments or individuals as the culprits." Despite the dearth of hard data, Wired News, in a story headlined "Smells Like Teen Malcontent," suggested the "packet monkeys" wreaking havoc on big-name sites are probably adolescents. A separate story, hyperbolically describing the attack as a "World War Internet," cast unsubstantiated suspicion on university students: "The reason: Campuses have fast connections to the Internet -- necessary to overwhelm sites as large as Yahoo and Amazon -- and dorm and faculty computers have notoriously poor security."

Meanwhile, the programmers hanging out on Slashdot engaged in some head-scratching about who did what and why, and entertained a few good government conspiracy stories. One post pointed to a theory apparently screwed together by Internet gadfly Jim Warren, speculating on Clinton administration involvement in the hack. Warren noted the suspicious proximity of last week's Clinton's budget proposal -- which earmarked $240 million for electronic wiretapping systems -- to several concurrent security breaches, including the string of Net attacks this week. "What better way to 'prove' the need for massively expanded government surveillance," suggested Warren, "and create a frenzy of support for it?!"

In a similar display of conspiracy-mongering, Web designer Ron Knox posted a message to the NoEnd mailing list, which caters to Bay Area designers, linking the attack to the outlawed DVD encryption descrambling program DeCSS. Knox pointed out that on Jan. 20, after a district court judge prohibited any U.S. Web site from posting the DeCSS code, hacker groups like 2600 pledged to protest; less than three weeks later the attacks began. "Connection?" wrote Knox. "I wonder. Although I would imagine taking down anything connected with the Motion Picture [Association] of America (like movie studio sites) would have been more to the point (and more obvious). But maybe no one would have noticed."

No cynical souls have yet accused the blue-chip Net sites themselves of conspiring to fake the attacks and generate scads of publicity -- but give 'em time. You know they're out there.