A hacker who engineered the cyber-hijacking of the world's leading supplier of Web addresses has been arrested in Canada on charges of wire fraud.

Mr Eugene Kashpureff, co-founder of Alternic, was apprehended outside Toronto after a month-long investigation by the FBI.

The charges reportedly stem from Mr Kashpureff's virtual attack this summer on the Web site of Network Solutions, the Herndon company that controls most domain names, which are used for Internet addresses.

This summer, Mr Kashpureff hacked into Network Solutions' computer system and redirected people trying to reach its address - www.internic.net - to his own site, www.alternic.net. He said he pulled the prank to protest Network Solutions' exclusive agreement with the National Science Foundation to assign and route traffic to the five most popular Web domain addresses - .com, .org, .net, .gov and .edu - for the past five years. - (New York Times Service)