A 16 year old Canadian teenage hacker is facing over 60 criminal
charges for crippling a number of high-profile web sites earlier
this year.
The teenager, who cannot be named under Canadian law, yesterday
pleaded not guilty to all charges. These include distributed denial
of service (DDoS) attacks in February on the web sites of CNN,
Amazon.com, eBay and Dell.
In a DDoS attack, a programmer secretly embeds software into
hundreds or thousands of computers. At a designated command or
time, infected host computers send messages to a target computer.
The volume of messages arriving over the internet effectively
cripples the target server, making the web site inaccessible to
other internet users.
Police in the US and Canada identified the person responsible as
someone using the name Mafiaboy in chat sites and on internet
message boards.
If convicted, the maximum sentence the teenager can face under
Canadian law is two years in a youth detention centre.
