Teenage Web menace held as Mounties get their man

The Canadian Mounted Police have arrested a suspect in connection with February's distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on high-profile Web sites.

The DDoS attacks took down sites including Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo! and CNN.com, causing millions of dollars of lost revenue.

According to US reports, the suspect under arrest is a 15-year-old known on the Internet by his pseudonym MafiaBoy. The arrest is part of a wider investigation by the FBI.

Hackers use distributed servers to bombard a target Web site with requests. Because the requests come from a variety of IP addresses, they are not recognised as an attack by traditional security systems.

A statement from the Canadian police said; "The investigation has given authorities the opportunity to shed light on Internet attacks which have strongly shaken the heart of ecommerce world wide causing losses evaluated at many hundreds of millions of US dollars."

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