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

Judge's ruling silly

[tapiwa]

How is this for a ruling by the judge??

The judge also prohibited him from possessing any software not commercially available and banned him from using the Internet to talk with other hackers and hacking into any other Websites.

What is commercially available software?? Do GPL products only available for free download count?

Also, how do you ban someone from talking with hackers??? I think the true definition of what a hacker is was lost on the judge.

Lastly, why ban someone from doing something which is illegal anyway... hacking into other websites? The ruling should be modded down to -5 reduntant. :-)

Re:article illustrated something about family...

[Cmdr Taco (luser)]

Oh, come on. Did you read the whole article?

"Knesek recalls the wiretap and a portrait of a dysfunctional family. There were padlocks on the doors of the brothers' bedrooms. Mafiaboy "saw a lot, dealt with a lot, took a lot," recalled Knesek."

That, plus the part about the father being prosecuted for hiring a hit man, hints that some pretty freaky shit may have been going down in that house. At the very least, the boys were being raised in an ammoral atmosphere; it may have been worse than that. We'll probably never know what other bits of nastiness the feds got from the wiretaps.

Some years ago, a girl from my high school (years after I graduated) teamed up with a friend and ambushed her parents with a shotgun and an ax. Real messy stuff. Folks went around saying "How could that sweet girl ever do something like that?" It turned out in the trial that, since she could remember, she was abused physically and sexually, shared sexually with other cretins, was the object of homemade porn and was provided with a wide variety of drugs.

I'm not saying that sort of thing was going on in mafiaboy's case, but I've developed a deep [dis]repect for damages that can be done throught the effects of a "dysfunctional" family setting.