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2600 Asks: Is Mafiaboy Real?
A couple of people sent the 2600 story that's currently running about mafiaboy, the alleged brains behind the spate of recent large-scale DoS [?] attacks. 2600 has an interesting claim - that they went on IRC as mafiaboy, and that the security expert who claims to have found mafiaboy was snowed by what they told him over IRC - snowed by lies.
His homepage is http://www.ender.com/~icee/.
He dated a girl who later committed suicide, partly due to his idiocy.
He used to hang out on EFNet #depression.
Legend has it that the really good crackers never say anything and are never known to the world. I don't know if thats really true or not (how could you verify it, really?), but everyone else brags a lot.
Someone one asked Alfred Hitchcock what the ultimate crime was. His response: "The one we haven't heard about yet."
Seems apropos.
Someone on IRC lying about their identity? It defies belief. I'd write more, but this 19yr old 36DD nympho I met online wants to meet me "alone and unarmed". I'm so excited!
--Shoeboy
as you can see from the IRC logs below, we dropped a few clues that the person was in a country with snow and at one point "accidentally" spoke French to imply the province of Quebec. We were amazed when the blame actually landed on someone from Montreal.
The snow reference referrs to the following block of text:
=icee= but WHY do it?
[mafiaboy] snowday
[mafiaboy] haha
And the French referred to a single use of the word "Oui", late in the chat log. Now, the first use of the word "Canada", appears way at the top and comes not from 2600 (mafiaboy), but from *icee*.. again, before 2600 mentions snow or french:
*icee* oh, did you listen to our radio stuff up there in Canada, too?
That's it. The rest of the conversation is harmless, and this portion would be harmless except for the statement that 2600 made implying that these comments helped lead researchers to Canada. Give me a break.
I've got no idea who *icee* is, and 2600's claims that mafiaboy is fake or at least not the right guy are fine with me, but this conversation makes 2600 look less like they have a clue than the FBI who at least are talking about routing logs and web logs and real data. At least I got a laugh out of this:
=icee= okay, we need to solve this trust problem, and prove you are who you say you are..
[mafiaboy] 3090
[mafiaboy] good enough?
Yeah. Good enough. :-P
And his dad's too. I turns out that while they were after this canadian teenager, they discovered while wiretapping his house, that his 45-years-old dad was planning with a hitman to assault or scare the hell out of one of his business associates.
So, be careful, you never know when the police is coming to get your son =)
What a strange (and offtopic, I admit) coincidence.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
According th Reuters there are all sorts of ICQ, Usenet and IRC logs that connect Mafiaboy with the crime.
PS: Read the articles linked to the above article and judge for yourself if Mafiaboy is the real culprit or not.
...he lives in the heart of you and me, in anyone who's every sat bleary-eyed in front of a CRT at 3-am, anyone who has subsisted on Pop-tarts, Zingers, and Mountain Dew, anyone who has been shunned by society only to find acceptance in the warmth of a x86 processor! Yes, he even lives in you, Scarecrow! Every time you lick the neon Cheet-o residue off your fingers so you won't get it lodged in your keyboard...MafiaBoy is with you...each time the BSOD causes you to flop on the ground like a Pokemon-induced seizure...MafiaBoy is there flinching too!...every time you've told a newbie to try 'this really cool command, rm -r *'...MafiaBoy was laughing right along! Don't you see, Timmy? You can't touch or see MafiaBoy, he surrounds us, invisible yet guiding us. So, when those kids tell you there ain't such thing as MafiaBoy, you tell em' what ol' MorboNixon told ya! And that, ya see, is the real meaning of MafiaBoy. Now let me tell ye how I invented the question mark...
Danny: Hosts a boring local radio program
Emmanuel: Hosts a boring local radio program
Danny: Quasi celebrity status among '70's freaks
Emmanuel: Quasi celebrity status among telephone phreaks
Danny: Periods of heavy drug usage
Emmanuel: Periods of heavy drug usage
Danny: Involved in sex scandal with another man
Emmanuel: Involved in sex scandal with another man
Danny: Last name is "Bonaduce"
Emmanuel: Friends with Phiber Optik whose first handle was "Il Duce"
Danny: Supplements income by doing desperate local talk shows whenever he can
Emmanuel: Supplements income by doing desperate talk shows whenever he can
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