CYBER hackers have forced a Basingstoke internet company to close down - costing six people their jobs.

The award-winning internet service provider, Cloud-Nine Communications, based at Wade Road in Daneshill, is the victim of "internet terrorists", according to the company's chief executive officer Emeric Miszti.

Devastated Mr Miszti - a finalist in the Basingstoke business Awards in 1998 and 1999 - had hoped to get the company floated on the stock exchange this year. He has now had to make his six-strong staff redundant.

He said: "It took six years to build up the company and a week for terrorists to close it down."

Mr Miszti added the purpose of the hackers was to destroy and disrupt his business, which in 2000 was listed by on-line ISP Review as Internet Service Provider of the Year.

Ex-Basingstoke councillor Mr Miszti and operations director John Parr took the step to close down the company's internet connections after Cloud-Nine was plagued by hackers who prevented customers from accessing their websites.

Mr Miszti has frantically been in contact with other ISP companies so that customers' websites can be transferred. He is currently in negotiations with Zetnet based in Scotland.

Mr Miszti said most of his 7,000 customers are medium to small-sized companies, who face losing millions of pounds of business. About 50 are based in the town, including Basingstoke Town Football Club.

The hackers got through the company's security by getting into its system through one of the firm's shared web servers.

"They used a technique known as FTP Bounce - if you connect to a server and you try to upload something, somebody takes over your connection and uploads a malicious code," said Mr Miszti.

This makes the server unstable and allows hackers to map the company's network ready for a future attack, and leaves sites vulnerable to undesirable material being posted.

Mr Miszti said hackers sneaked into the company's system over the last five months.

He said: "What worries us is the patience they have shown - this was so well planned.

"When we detected them, we immediately started taking measures to try to establish the extent of the breach.

"However, when we started doing that, we think they escalated their operations and that is when they launched a full denial of service to cause maximum chaos."

Hampshire Police's computer crime unit is investigating the company's logs to try to trace the culprits.