Cyber Attacks that Costed a Lot

MAFIABOY ATTACK

MAFIABOY ATTACK

A 15-year-old boy has been charged with two counts of computer mischief for crippling the CNN website and 1,200 related sites in a cyber attack, police said yesterday.
His computer name was “Mafiaboy”, but he cannot be identified under Canadian law.

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

The apparently coordinated attacks overloaded the sites with a barrage of messages generated by hackers.

Inspector Yves Roussel of the Royal Canadian Mounted police said the boy had boasted in internet chat rooms about what he had done. The boy was released on bail conditions that included not connecting to the internet.
an internet consultant, said cyber attacks would continue. “We shouldn’t feel any more safe because of this arrest,” he said. “It is a new form of terrorism called cyber terrorism.
A spokesman for the FBI said the damage caused by international hacking could run to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The attacks involved placing tools on middleman computers and remotely ordering them to overwhelm the victim site 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 area of Portland, Oregon. Investigators say that dozens, even hundreds, of middlemen computers were used in the attacks.