Montreal Cops Charge Web Suspect

By Jack Branswell Associated Press Writer Wednesday, April 19, 2000; 12:49 p.m. EDT

MONTREAL  A 15-year-old boy has been charged with two counts of computer mischief for crippling the CNN Web site and 1,200 related sites for four hours in a February cyber attack, police said Wednesday.

Cyber attacks against CNN, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com, ETrade and other major Web sites in February inconvenienced millions of Internet users and raised questions about Internet security.

Inspector Yves Roussel of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said the youth had boasted in Internet chat rooms frequented by hackers about what he had done. Roussel said police obtained a search warrant and went to the boy's Montreal home on April 15.

Computers and software equipment were seized and the youth was arrested. He appeared in Youth Court on Monday on the two mischief to data charges for a Feb. 8 attack on the CNN site and related sites.

He was released on an undisclosed amount of bail.

The bail terms restricted the boy from going to any store dealing in computer equipment or computer use. He is also only allowed to use school computers for schoolwork under close supervision, Roussel said.

The suspect goes by the computer name "Mafiaboy," but his real name cannot be disclosed under Canadian law.

The investigation conducted jointly by the computer investigation unit of the RCMP and the FBI and U.S. Justice Department was continuing, and more arrests could be made, Roussel said.

"Wherever they are, hackers will be investigated and arrested," Roussel said.

FBI spokesman William Lynn, sitting next to Roussel at a news conference, said the damage caused by such international hacking could run into the millions of dollars.

The hacking attacks involved placing tools on unwitting middleman computers and remotely ordering them to overwhelm the victim sites with fake traffic.

Three computers have been identified as middlemen in the February attacks: a computer at the University of California, Santa Barbara; a router at Stanford University; and a home business computer in the Portland, Ore., area. Investigators say that dozens, even hundreds, of middlemen computers were used in the February attacks.

Another RCMP officer, staff Sgt. Jean-Pierre Roy, refused to provide details of how the youth took part in the attacks. He said Mafiaboy may have used a California university computer for the attack, and that he left traces of his activity that allowed police to find him.

"It is our estimation that Mafiaboy wasn't that good," Roy said. "He wasn't what we would call a genius."

-- (@ .), April 19, 2000

Answers

He bragged about it in internet chat rooms?

If I were a 15 year old who thought that hacking computers was a cool thing to do, I might brag that I had done it. My guess is that with no good leads to follow, the law turned to gossip on the internet. Thus, some 15 year old boy trying to impress the world with his computer knowledge by bragging that he was responsible for the hack attack (even though he wasn't)becomes the #1 suspect. That is closely followed by the media trying, convicting, and advising on sentencing within a matter of days.

-- J (Y2J@home.comm), April 20, 2000.