Mafiaboy Case

Mafiaboy

Main problem

Aget Clothing began to sell products online five months ago and its revenue had grown by $1.2 million or four percent. However, recently it suffered the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and the web services were completely shut down by the attack. Fortunately the attack occurred at 1:15 a.m. and lasted only 12 minutes, so that customer impact was minimal. However, it’s a bad sign. It indicates that Aget Clothing information technology (IT) security is so fragile and problematic. If next attack happens during daytime or even last longer, the lost would be mass. Despite the loss of sales revenue, the loss of shutdown of systems or theft of customer data could do irreparable damage to the firm.

DDoS (distributed denial of service)

In the year 2000, 15-year-old Michael Calce attacked 11 big corporate networks by using DDoS. The attacks caused, according to investigators, approximately 1.7 billion dollars in loss for these companies but there is dispute regarding the accuracy of that figure. The attacks caused some of these companies' websites and networks to be difficult to reach. In some cases, they crashed completely, remaining offline from mere hours to as long as several days. Since the attacks were so large, it prompted the authorities to investigate. Authorities found that someone by the name of Mafiaboy (Michael Calce) was bragging about the attacks on websites, message boards and even on his own site and caught Mafiaboy. Michael Calce’s punishment did not fit the crime. He was sentenced to a year of probation, restricted use of the Internet and a small fine.

The main problem for DDoS is that even a 15-year-old unskilled boy could attack those companies’ websites and cause that amount of loss, so almost everyone could launch this attack. And it’s impossible for those companies to recover those