Computer hacker Mafiaboy arrested

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Last updated: Wednesday 19 April 2000 NATIONAL NEWS

Computer hacker Mafiaboy arrested by Montreal police in Web attacks: ABC

MONTREAL (CP) - A 15-year-old Canadian boy known online by the moniker Mafiaboy has been arrested in the attacks on major Web sites in February, ABC News reported Tuesday night.

RCMP in Montreal said they had made an arrest in the cyber attacks against CNN, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon.com, Excite and Etrade - but made no mention of Mafiaboy.

"The investigation has given authorities the opportunity to bring light on internet attacks that have strongly shaken the heart of electronic commerce worldwide causing losses that were evaluated at many hundred millions of U.S. dollars," the RCMP said.

The investigation was conducted jointly by the computer investigation unit of the RCMP and the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department.

Canadian authorities arrested the teen in the Montreal area over the weekend and charged him on Monday, said ABC News.

It said said the youth has been charged with at least one of the attacks which crippled the leading Web sites and alarmed Internet users around the world and shook the e-commerce industry.

The attackers took over computers around the world and used them to bombard victims' sites with so much data that users could not access them.

Investigators traced the attacks by examining the log files of a computer at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which was among those used to attack the CNN.com site.

A hacker electronically broke into the UCSB computer on Feb. 8 and instructed it to send large amounts of traffic to CNN.com's Web site, campus network programmer Kevin Schmidt told ABC News.com.

Internet Direct, a Toronto-based Internet provider, gave the RCMP the identity of a person known as Mafiaboy in February.

The Mounties executed a search warrant at the company's Montreal office looking for confidential customer account data and Internet usage statistics of a certain customer.

The nickname Mafiaboy became one of the hottest handles in cyberspace after revelations surfaced that someone using that nickname was at the centre of the investigation.

The RCMP statement said more details on the arrests were to be released at a news conference Wednesday.

http://www.vancouversun.com/cgi-bin/newsite.pl?adcode=n-mm&modulename=national%20news&template=national&nkey=vs&filetype=fullstory&file=/cpfs/national/000419/n041920.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 19, 2000

Answers

If a 15 year old kid can bring major internet companies to their knees, what does that say about the viability of these highly capitalized business entities?

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), April 19, 2000.

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