After tracking hundreds of leads over several months, law-enforcement authorities finally tracked down the computer hacker they believe to be responsible for the February cyber-attacks against CNN, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com and other well-known Web sites.
Perhaps the most disquieting revelation in the wake of the arrest is that the culprit who inconvenienced millions of Internet users was no computer wiz — no Bill Gates gone bad.
Rather, he was merely a mischievous 15-year-old Montreal youth operating under the computer handle “Mafiaboy” and with far too much idle time on his hands.
“It is our estimation that Mafiaboy wasn’t that good,” said Jean-Pierre Roy, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which arrested the teenaged hacker nine days ago. “He wasn’t what we would call a genius.”
So if a non-genius, if a hacker who isn’t that good, could wage the largest cyber-attack on Internet sites in memory, according to the FBI, one can only imagine what mayhem a real computer genius (or a hacker who is merely “good” at what he does) could achieve.
That is why federal law-enforcement officials, from Attorney General Janet Reno on down, have elevated computer crime to the list of threats to national security not far behind terrorism and foreign espionage.
Indeed, in recent congressional testimony, Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder said the susceptibility of the nation’s private and public computer infrastructure is “astonishingly high,” adding that “online crime is rapidly increasing.”
For the private sector, for companies engaged in business over the Internet, the increasing incidence of cyber-attacks poses a threat to their bottom lines.
In fact, Mafiaboy’s February attack on eBay, Amazon and the other Web sites will end up costing more than $1.2 billion in losses, missed revenues and expenses for security upgrades, according to Yankee Group, a Boston market-research company. Of course, it is impossible to determine how much such…