'Mafiaboy' will be sentenced in April

A 16-year-old Montreal boy will be sentenced in April for his admitted guilt in paralyzing the Web sites of several U.S. companies, such as Yahoo, Amazon and eBay, while acting as the hacker Mafiaboy in February 2000.

The unidentified boy, who quit school and works a menial job, Thursday pleaded guilty to five counts of mischief, 51 counts of illegal access to a computer and one count of breach of bail conditions, said Leo Monbourquette, a spokesman with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The boy will be sentenced on April 17 and 18 in the Youth Court of Quebec before Judge Gills Ouellet, Monbourquette added.

The judge possesses broad discretion on what kind of sentence he can impose, ranging from a fine to detention, Monbourquette said. The unidentified boy also must abide by a curfew of staying at his family's home from 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., he said. The maximum fine he can receive is $661.

The boy admitted guilt in a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks between Feb. 6, 2000 and Feb. 14, 2000, on several commercial networks like AOL Time Warner's CNN network, ETrade Group and Dell's Web site. Eleven sites in all were adversely impacted. The denial-of-service attacks flooded companies' networks with phony information requests that caused networks to shut down, resulted in lost business, equipment damage and even made stock prices dip.

The boy utilized a distributed denial-of-service tool he obtained from another hacker called Sinkhole and utilized the power of more than 70 computers in 52 different networks, most of them in universities, to flood the commercial Webs and shut them down, Canadian authorities have said.

The boy's attorney said his client admits his role in the attacks and wants to get on with his life.

"He is anxious to have this whole situation behind him," said Yan Romanowski, an attorney in Montreal representing the boy. "His ambition one day is to go to a computer school."

The RCMP and FBI officials have estimated that Mafiaboy caused $1.7 billion in damage. When Romanowski heard the figure, he called it a "shocker."

"I absolutely can not believe that is the damage," he said. "I don't even think it was close to that."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.