Hacker 'Mafiaboy' pleads guilty to mischief

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.thestar.com/apps/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=979743248124&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News

Jan. 18, 2000 - 10:48 EDT

MONTREAL (CP) - The computer hacker known as Mafiaboy, who crippled
several major Internet sites including CNN, pleaded guilty on Thursday
to 55 charges of mischief.

The trial of the 16-year-old Montrealer was set to begin Thursday on
66 charges relating to attacks last year on several major Web sites,
as well as security breaches of other sites at institutions such as
Yale and Harvard.

The court had just convened when Crown prosecutor Louis
Miville-Deschenes announced the youth had pleaded guilty to most of
the charges.

He will be freed pending sentencing.

The trial was expected to last three to six months, involve many
witnesses and complex technical testimony.

The boy was first arrested on two mischief charges last April after
somebody calling themselves Mafiaboy crippled CNN's Web site last
February.

Last August, the Crown added 64 new hacking and mischief charges.

Ten counts of mischief relate to denial-of-service attacks on the Web
sites, including Yahoo, Amazon.com, e-Bay, and Dell.com. The sites
were bombarded with thousands of simultaneous messages, which
prevented legitimate users from accessing them.

The remaining charges deal with hacking into computers, many of them
located at American universities such as Harvard and Yale.

The boy, who can't be identified under provisions of the Young
Offenders Act, had pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

The high-profile Mafiaboy case raised concerns both in the United
States and Canada about Internet security.

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