Slashdot Mirror
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.
the article showed something about a family's influence. Mafiaboy's father was a business type that cared little about his kids, resulting in some problems for them, as shown in Mafiaboy's DoS actions and problems in school (suspensions, expelled from one school, etc). During the investigations of the DoS attacks, they found that the father was trying to hire a hitman to kill a business associate for getting screwed on a deal.
If anything, it shows why good family life generally fosters good behavior in kids. I wouldnt be surprised if other 5r1p7 k1dd135 out there have similar family life to that of Mafiaboy.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
By using words like these in the wrong context, we're linguistically painting orselves into a corner.
This reminds me of something C. S. Lewis once wrote:
The word gentleman 'originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - 'Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?' They meant well.
The lesson is that 'MafiaBoy' was just stupid. He went and hacked sites and publicly bragged about it. He even asked people to dictate his next target.
If you go and rob a store and then brag about how you did it at the bar, you're gonna get caught.
Stupid stupid stupid...
Should be required reading for all script kiddies and wanna-bes.
It's damn difficult to totally cover your tracks. Unless you're truely elite, if the FBI wants you badly enough, they'll find you and you'll be making some hairy-backed felon a very happy man.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
No, they have convinced you paranoid folk that they are all seeing and all knowing. The rest of us know they only see and know the criminal.
Good to know he's going to jail! I mean, now he will reform after spending countless hours locked in a room recieving nothing but negative attention. The reign of chaos he was about to bring upon us was narrowly avoided. He must be one of those terrorists. *End sarcasm* This kid is another fine example of the product our society is producing.
_____ "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- Orwell
Just what we need - more ego stroking for Mafiaboy. Doesn't anybody understand that articles like this are what drives these assholes into making these attacks? They do this for the egobo - "Look at me! All these major news outlets are talking about me! Aren't I wonderful?"
I think one of the single best ways we could discourage this crap would be to take anybody we catch doing this, and cane them on national TV. Show the piss running down their legs, show them crying for their mommies. Then follow up on them in prison - ask them how many times they've been the woman. Make sure they look as uncool as possible. That way, when the other would-be script kiddies see this, they won't think it's cool - they will think it's most uncool.
(/me continues to whack hornets' nest known as Slashdot)
There was a good reason for punishments like the stocks - it made everyone in the community see that breaking the rules was BAD, and that BAD things happened to those who broke the rules. Yes, it was cruel to the individuals in the stocks. News flash - IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE! It tended to make even the lowest miscreant reconsider his actions. I'm sorry if it offends you, but who better to suffer the consequences of negative actions but the moron who committed them!
Look - if somebody makes an honest mistake, cut them some slack - I'm not for throwing somebody into the stocks because they missed a stop sign, or because they accidentally didn't secure their computer. But if somebody with malice aforethought commits an act against the community, I say "Nuke them 'till they glow, shoot them in the dark, and let $deity sort 'em out".
www.eFax.com are spammers
Whitout the judge's exact ruling, you can't say for sure if there are loopholes (or problems) with it. Remember it's a recap by a journalist, which he probably interpreted some way or the other.
"Commercially available": if I sell commercially (or offer to sell commercially, along with a free (beer) version) some cracking tools (with or without a warning about not using them on other networks), can Mafiaboy use them?
For the "hackers", the judge probably didn't use that word, and it was probably more geared towards IRCing in crackerz (or 31337) chatrooms.
And your last point... it means if he does it again, he is liable for doing it in the first place, and then for doing it when a judge told him not to do it. I'm not sure about the name of that charge though, but it's more serious (recidivist).
Hmm, where do I start citing studies that show the negative effects of negative reinforcement (read: punishment). Maybe
Bonnie, R.J. (1985). The efficacy of law as a paternalistic instrument. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 29, 131-211.
Wilde, G.J.S. (1981). A critical view of countermeasure development and evaluation. In L. Goldberg, Alcohol, drugs and traffic safety. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, pp. 1145-1159.
In short, punishment generally causes people to be more anti-social, resentful, angry, vindictive, and prone to committing acts of sabotage. (Hundreds of years of increasingly punitive laws certainly haven't eliminated crime.)
Pillorying someone never stopped anyone else from doing the same thing (ever read The Scarlet Letter?); it only drove them deeper underground.
Now enough with this ridiculous "mild punishments don't work, so let's punish them more!" attitude. (That poison made me sick; I'm gonna eat more to see if it'll make me better!) In order to stop someone from behaving in a certain way, you have to stop the causes, not the symptoms. People in occupational safety and health have known about this one for years, and I'm not even going to get into the politics behind prisons...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Spare me the sob story. If it were up to me, I'd keep this kid away from any general-purpose computer and have him complete his studies in juvie the old-fashioned way, with paper and pencil. Perhaps I would have allowed him to use a computer, but only if the computer had no modem, no NIC, no anything - I'll bet this kid never did anything off-line except play games.
We don't have the judge's actual ruling, only a snippit from a reporter, so we shouldn't even be discussing this - the judge may have given a very specific definition. If that definition excludes some possibly useful and harmless program, well then tant pis; the judge was generous enough allowing the kid anywhere near a computer as this kid has never used his computer for anything useful (Starcraft, IRC and launching DOS attacks are not useful nor educational).
I think the true definition of what a hacker is was lost on the judge.
This "true definition" is completely rejected by mainstream America, and in fact, by most of the computing world, both in academia and the business world, both inside and outside of the US. The definition of hacker that you'll find in the New Hacker's Dictionary is an MIT-ism. Nobody outside of MIT ever uses it, and the FSF is so intimately intertwined with MIT that they don't realize this.
The old-school "hackers" that you're talking about never dwelled in the script kiddie community. RMS was a math prodigy at Harvard; ESR was math and philosophy guy and never took a computer class; Larry Wall was trained as a linguist at Berkeley during the time when BSD was created, but he never touched Unix at Berkeley. And yet you would claim that barring this kid from using a specific set of software is going to stunt his growth?
So let's be honest: the warez hoarders and the script-kiddies on IRC - nothing useful has ever come out of these communities. All it has done is sully the reputation and the arguments of those who actually do any useful work: when Johannsen claims to a judge that he had a legitimate purpose for writing DeCSS, the judge won't believe him as he (and his peers) have already heard the same argument a thousand times from warez kiddies and the script kiddies trying to "show off" bad security.
My point here is that there is very little overlap between the kiddies and the "hackers" your talking about - all your insistence on propagating this MIT-ism of "hacker" does is confuse people as to which is which.
Okay, obviously this was big news but honestly not many people were exactly surprised where they? The tools that allowd this kid to pull this off had been identified already, the theory was pretty well established. Was knocking out Yahoo for 12 hours really a disruption of the "Internet Economy"?
The article was interesting, a good read. There was really any surpising information in there, punk toublemaker kid out to cause shit, surprise. THe fact that the author went to great length trying to paint this as some super mega massive disruption or something was very anoying. Yes this was an important event because of the new level of media attention but it was not an especially shocking event in a technical sense. Nobody was surprised it happened.
Sounds hard to interpret. "Your honor, I bought gcc and python from RedHat, and fed them some data that I entered" is probably a violation (in the judge's opinion, which is all that matters).
Yet, "Your honor, I bought Excel from Microsoft" is probably not a violation (in the judge's opinion) if the kid makes a spreadsheet that has a macro that adds up some numbers. But as the complexity of the macro grows from adding numbers to installing viruses, the judge's mind is going to change. At exactly what point does the "software I'm running" change from the app to the active data?
python
4+4
(Python prints 8.) Have I violated yet? Most would say no...
print 4+4 (a command instead of just an expression)
(Python prints 8.) Have I violated yet? Surely not yet...
from socket import *
(Oh dear. At what point do I cross the line?)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Agreed. The article says that the kid had obviously researched his targets rather thoroughly. This takes time, planning, understanding, and an extreme desire for attention.
He was a script kiddie, though. He took the scripts and apps of other people and used them for what he did. He did not seem to have a thorough understanding of the things he was doing, the article says he had to type commands several times before they'd work. I don't know about you, but even things I use casually are embedded in my fingertips, and having to retype a command isn't a very common occurence. Having to retype it 3-4 times is a non-occurence.
If the kid had been a real hacker (using the geek-culture definition of the word...) He would have taken that time and desire for recognition and learned new OSes thoroughly, written a program or ten, or taken up a more positive pursuit. Or at the very least, I believe that he would have been too afraid of doing what he did--because he'd know of the limitations he'd face in the future. Being shackled in the computer world would be far too painful a thing for someone who was really into it.
If you want to play in the Pros, you stay away from drugs. If you want to have your freedom on the internet, you stay away from illegal activities.
Or you become so damned good at covering your tracks that no one could ever find you.
-Sara
This is not quite true. The so-called smurf attack did lend substantial leverage, but nothing in the realm of thousand-fold leverage, never mind tens of thousands. For one, few people configured their networks this way (with >1k hosts on a single broadcast address) even before smurf attacks came into vogue. For another, empirically speaking, I can tell you that the best addresses that you could normally expect to find, even in its hay day, is in the realm of 500 or so, and many of these hosts would easily saturate their own upstream (e.g., T1) links, so you'd need a lot of other equally leveraged addresses to take advantage of it. In other words, it's unrealistic to say that a 56k modem or what have you could take down something like Yahoo using its own bandwidth to originate the attack. A T1 or T3 perhaps, but much more is just unrealistic.
I also assert that a smurf attack is not "easy" to trace. It's actually very time consuming and troublesome, especially if the person does something like launch an attack from a machine that is set up, cleaned of all evidence, and abandoned (permanently) and uses a diverse list of broadcasts so that each broadcast address is only used a couple times. Almost every person that has gotten in trouble for such attacks has been detected by their own upstream usage (i.e., highly aberrantbehavior that invites further investigation by their own provider or upstream provider(s)) and/or a result of bragging about their exploits, ala mafiaboy and company. That said, it is a stupid and highly unoriginal attack (but just because it's stupid and foolish doesn't mean it can't be used to great effect) Anyone that launches an attack from their OWN modem or similar traceable equipment is both especially stupid and doomed.