Mafiaboy Pleads Guilty

The National Infrastructure Protection Center and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced today that on January 18, 2001, the 15-year-old male known on the Internet as Mafiaboy, appeared before the Montreal Youth Court in Canada and plead guilty to 56 counts. These counts include mischief to property in excess of $5000 against Internet sites including CNN.com, Yahoo.com, and EBay.com, in relation to the February 2000 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In each of these instances, the DDoS attacks prevented the victim sites from offering their web services on the Internet to legitimate users. The other counts relate to unauthorized access to several other Internet sites, including U.S. universities.

This investigation was worked jointly with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and illustrates the benefits of the long and productive partnership between the FBI and the RCMP in investigating computer crime matters.