ITinfo: >Mafiaboy, E-Commerce's Thorn, Pleads Guilty

Mafiaboy Pleads Guilty

DDOS cracker may get jail time

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Mafiaboy, E-Commerce's Thorn, Pleads Guilty

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

A 16-year-old Montreal computer cracker who goes by the name Mafiaboy pleaded guilty to 56 charges related to Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks last year on some of the busiest commercial Web sites in the United States.

The high school freshman broke into computer networks across the globe and implanted software programs that bombarded American websites last February, bringing 11 major e-commerce websites to a crawl or stopping them completely. The affected sites included Amazon.com, CNN.com, eBay.com, and yahoo.com.

He boasted of thwarting the police investigation by trashing his hard disk and throwing it in the river. He also boasted of attacking the dell.com website, an attack that had not been reported by Dell Computer Corporation.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that the youngster caused $1.7 billion in damage by slowing or paralyzing access to the websites for up to six hours.

During six weeks of electronic surveillance, by law enforcement authorities, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Mafiaboy used four Internet service providers to break into networks, largely ones maintained by United States and Canadian universities.

As a minor, the maximum penalty that the youth faces is two years in prison and a $650 fine.

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References

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DDOS Outages Cost $1.2 Billion
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Hit the Net
Hackers Take Down Yahoo!

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