The National Infrastructure Protection
Center and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced
today that on January 18, 2001, the fifteen year old male, known
on the Internet as Mafiaboy, appeared before the Montreal Youth
Court in Canada and plead guilty to 56 counts. These counts include
mischief to property in excess of $5000 against Internet sites
including CNN.com, Yahoo.com, and EBay.com, in relation to the
February 2000 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In
each of these instances, the DDoS attacks prevented the victim
sites from offering their web services on the Internet to legitimate
users. The other counts relate to unauthorized access to several
other Internet sites, including U.S. universities.
This investigation was worked
jointly with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and illustrates
the benefits of the long and productive partnership between the
FBI and the RCMP in investigating computer crime matters.