Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Computer Crime

[Jerry Gamblin <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 1/6/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Jerry Gamblin wrote:
>
> > High school senior arrested and charged with a felony for linking to
> > school computer system, telling everyone to log on to it and hit 'F5'
> > repeatedly. Also investigated for sophisticated 'steal the mouse ball
> > computer' prank.
> >
> > http://www.wkyc.com/akron/akron_article.aspx?storyid=45721
>
> The article was very short, so I appended it below.  The "mouse ball" line
> was a joke, apparently.  Anyway, this is a serious denial of service
> attack, isn't it?  He made a web page, then asked people to use it to
> attack computers in his school.  Then the school noticed that its
> computers were affected -- they "started slowing down."  Then the boy was
> arrested.  I am not especially sympathetic.  Maybe he didn't know how
> serious this is, but it looks like he won't do jail time, so what's wrong
> with the way this is being handled?

Maybe you don't know how un-serious this is. You cant really DOS a
website by hitting F5.  I went to the website
(http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/) he DOS'd with the magic F5 key and it
is 19 kilobits. Once the images are cashed on your local drive it is 3
kilobits.  So, It would take 341 people refreshing at the exact same
time to cause a 1 meg spike in the bandwidth to that server for one
second. To keep that up over a minute you would need  20460 people
hitting the F5 key at the right time.

It was a joke the kid was charged with a felony, this should have been
handled in the school.  If he gets put in front of a judge with no
computer knowledge and is found guilty the kid will have the rest of
his life ruined over nothing.





--
Thanks,

Jerry Gamblin

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