F I R S T || B L O G

Who is Mafiaboy?  What crime did he commit?

Michael Calce (born 1986, also known as MafiaBoy) is a high school student from ÎleBizard, Quebec, who launched a series of highly publicized denial-of-serviceattacks in February 2000 against large commercial websites, including Yahoo!,Fifa.com, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. He also launched a series of failed simultaneous attacks against nine of the thirteen root name servers.

 Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MafiaBoy

• How did mafiaboy performed the attack?

Calce targeted Yahoo! with a project he named Rivolta, meaning “riot” in Italian. Rivolta was a denial-of-service attack in which servers become overloaded with different types of communications to the point where they become unresponsive to commands.At the time, Yahoo! was a multi billion-dollar web company and the top search engine. Mafiaboy’s Rivolta managed to shut down Yahoo! for almost an hour. Calce’s goal was, according to him, to establish dominance for himself and TNT, his cybergroup, in the cyberworld. Buy.com was shut down in response.Calce responded to this in turn by bringing down eBay, CNN, and Amazon via DDoS over the next week. Calce attempted but was unsuccessful in bringing down Dell during this DDoS attack.

Reference: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/02/07/384567322/meet-mafiaboy-the-bratty-kid-who-took-down-the-internet

• Who is Onel de Guzman? What crime did he commit?

Onel de Guzman is a Filipino student from AMA who became a suspect for unleashing the “I Love You Virus” because of a thesis proposal he had submitted to his college which was rejected because it was unethical. Onel confessed that he may have accidentally spread the virus.

Reference : https://hackstory.home.blog/2018/12/10/who-is-onel-de-guzman-what-crime-did-he-commit/

• How did I love you virus spread throughout the world? How much the was the damage?

Messages generated in the Philippines began to spread westwards through corporate email systems. Because the worm used mailing lists as its source of targets, the messages often appeared to come from acquaintances and were therefore often regarded as “safe” by their victims, providing further incentive to open them. Only a few users at each site had to access the attachment to generate millions more messages that crippled mail systems and overwrote millions of files on computers in each successive network.

The outbreak was later estimated to have caused US $5.5–8.7 billion in damages worldwide,[6][7] and estimated to cost US$15 billion to remove the worm.[8] Within ten days, over fifty million infections had been reported,[9] and it is estimated that 10% of internet-connected computers in the world had been affected.[7] Damage cited was mostly the time and effort spent getting rid of the infection and recovering files from backups. To protect themselves, The Pentagon, CIA, the British Parliament and most large corporations decided to completely shut down their mail systems.[10] The I LOVE YOU virus infected computers all over the world. At the time it was one of the world’s most destructive computer related disasters ever.

Reference : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU

• Who is the suspect behind hacking the COMELEC website in 2016?

Paul Biteng, A the 20-year-old IT graduate student and Joenel de Asis — also a 23-year-old Computer Science graduate

Reference : https://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/130252-suspected-hacker-comelec-website-nabbed

• What was the reason behind the Hacking?

The reason behind hacker shacked the comelec is ensure that the Comelec will implement the security features of vote-counting machines (VCMs)

Reference : https://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/130252-suspected-hacker-comelec-website-nabbed

• What are the possible and most dangerous effects of Computer viruses in the computer systems and websites?

A computer virus is a software program designed to replicate itself and spread to other machines. In most cases, the program is “malicious,” meaning its purpose is to cause the computer malfunction in some way.

Reference : https://www.webroot.com/in/en/resources/tips-articles/computer-security-threats-computer-viruses

• What is the difference between a hacker and a cracker?

Crackers, also known as “malicious hackers” and “black-hat hackers“, are different because although they have the same skills as a hacker, they use their power to commit criminal acts. For example, crackers can send viruses,steal personal information and commit other crimes using just their skills and a home computer.

Reference :  http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=30048

• Differentiate computer virus from a worm.

Computer worms are similar to viruses in that they replicate functional copies of themselves and can cause the same type of damage. In contrast to viruses, which require the spreading of an infected host file, worms are standalone software and do not require a host program or human help to propagate.

Reference : https://www.varonis.com/blog/what-is-a-computer-virus-and-computer-worm/

• How can a system or website  be protected against computer malware and hacking?

            Systems or Website will be protected against computer malware and hacking through installing Firewall,  Install AntiVirus Software ,Install Anti-Spyware Software, Use Complex and Secure Passwords and Check  on the Security Settings of the Browser.

Reference : https://antivirus.comodo.com/blog/computer-safety/5-simple-steps-protect-pc/