Mafiaboy Takes Rap On 55 Counts
What could have been a lengthy trial for a Canadian teen
hacker evaporated today when the youth known as "Mafiaboy" pleaded
guilty to charges that he broke into Internet servers and
used them as launching pads for attacks on high-profile Web sites.
The 16-year-old from Montreal, Quebec, was facing 66 charges of
mischief resulting from the attacks on sites that included
Amazon.com, CNN.com, Yahoo.com, and the Web home of computer maker
Dell. The teen, who can't be identified under Canadian law, had
earlier pleaded innocent, but Crown prosecutor Louis Miville-
Deschenes said today that "Mafiaboy" pleaded guilty to 55 of those
charges.
The guilty pleas will avert a trial that would have detailed how
investigators in the US and Canada traced attacks on the popular
Web sites to "zombie" Internet hosts that had been used by a hacker
to launch distributed denial of service attacks.
The zombie computers - many of them within university networks -
were loaded with utilities that the hacker activated remotely
and which bombarded the target Web servers with so many requests
they often buckled under the load.
The charges against "Mafiaboy" related both to the crippling of the
Web sites and the network break-ins required to build the army of
zombie hosts.
The youth now awaits sentencing.