Tracking Mafiaboy

Cruciform writes "The National Post has an article on the police effort to track Mafiaboy two years ago as the DoS attacks raged against Yahoo, E-trade and others. An interesting read." Its a fairly lengthy story with lots of little bits in this tale of a script kiddie.

Comments

Re:hhmm

[dolby2]

Anything to do with the "Royal Mounted Police" is hilarious imho

Re:the interesting part is right at then end

[Quazion]

I wonder when MS will create hacking tools ;) could telnet be a nice one ?

Gotta love this part

[Anonymous Coward]

"The 14-year-old boy who liked basketball and girls would soon capture the attention of the entire online world"

Surely an interest in basketball and girls would make him ineligable as a hardcore cracker? I mean such wholesome interests, how could this possibly happen?!?

inaccurate?

[KidSock]

By the time it was over, the Yahoo! attack alone would involve enough data to fill 630 pickup trucks with paper.

But what font size did they use?

Re:Good lesson for all

[Johnny Mnemonic]

It's damn difficult to totally cover your tracks

Well, Mafiaboy himself sure helped. From the article:
The administrators at the university produced a copy of the attack tool used, which was registered to a user named Mafiaboy...

Moral of the story: don't register your hacking software back to yourself. Kinda like "don't sign each counterfeit bill you make".

Re:the interesting part is right at then end

[ImaLamer]

So.... he can still download and use warez right?

Re:Misuse of the term "hacker"?

[danamania]

Is that your naked body on the entrance to your site?

No, it's not.

But with that comment you've quadrupled the normal daily visits I have to my site... all in the last 20 minutes. I think that's a pretty good effort!

a grrl & her server

Re:Phew!

[puppetman]

Only if you're Canadian. Blame Canada. Of course, he's actually from Quebec, so blame them.

Hey, maybe he really was designing a firewall...

[puppetman]

After all, many firewalls are designed by highschool students who don't show up to class with books/homework, who hate math, can't type ("agents watched him in real time as he attempted hacks and had to retype commands three, four, or five times before he got them right"), and download their tools from the Internet rather than programming them themselves.

This kid is a serious dimwit.

hacking session

[cr@ckwhore]

The FBI released a trace of Mafiaboy's hacking session... I've pasted it below

--
C:/> hack yahoo.com

Select hack type:

1) Denial of Service
2) Packet Trace
3) Steal Accounts
4) Get Root

Selection: 1

Enter Name: MafiaBoy

Proceed with hack #1 by MafiaBoy? [y/n]: Y

Hacking yahoo.com... please wait
...................FBI trace detected!
*abort*

C:\> cd 1337

C:\1337>

--
Thats pretty much all of the trace that the FBI released. I wasn't sure about the syntax of the hack command, but I guess this helps.

Re:the interesting part is right at then end

[m_evanchik]

MS '98 telnet is better than telnet on RH 7.2 .

At least in my limited experience.

Can't work at nyplgate.nypl.org through RH, but I can through MS.