He was a Montreal-area teenager with a rudimentary knowledge of computer hacking, but he single-handedly crippled the lucrative U.S. e-commerce market for brief periods in February 2000. In the process, the 15-year-old nicknamed Mafiaboy provided the RCMP with its first and finest example of a high-tech cross-border investigation, an international conference on policing and security was told yesterday.
The case also opened the eyes of the federal government, prompting it to get legislation on the table to help combat cybercrime, RCMP Sgt. Marc Gosselin said yesterday.
Gosselin, the lead Canadian investigator in the Mafiaboy case, said it's not easy to get evidence in denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers secretly crack into numerous computers, using those "zombie" computers to send multiple requests to a server to try to overwhelm it and shut it down.
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