"Mafiaboy" arrested in Canada for DoS attacks

Will Knight ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 19 Apr 2000 11:15 BST

A Canadian teenager was arrested Tuesday in connection with distributed denial of service (DoS) attacks on major Web site in February, according to reports.

The 15-year old teen was detained over the weekend by police in Montreal on suspicion of perpetrating the cyber attacks which felled Yahoo! CNN, ZDNet US and eBay.

The youth is believed to go by the hacking alias, "Mafiaboy", which has been linked by the FBI with February's attacks.

The FBI said they identified "Mafiaboy" as a potential suspect after examining servers at the University of California and chat room logs.

The DoS attacks demonstrated how easily some of the world's largest Web sites could be crippled by a simple piece of software.

Once installed on a number compromised remote machines, the software is able to flood a Web site with an unprecedented amount of fake traffic, rendering it inaccessible.

More news on this story as it becomes available

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