A Canadian teenage hacker known as Mafiaboy was yesterday sentenced to eight months’ in a youth detention centre for a series of disabling attacks on high-profile web sites such as Amazon.com, eBay, Dell, Excite, CNN and Yahoo!

The 17-year-old from Montreal, whose real name cannot legally be published, plead guilty earlier this year to 58 charges related to attacks and security breaches of web sites in the US, Canada, Denmark and Korea in February 2000. He was aged 15 at the time of the attacks.

Most of Mafiaboy's attakcs were denial of service attacks, where web sites are flooded with thousands of simultaneous, untraceable messages, overloading and crashing the servers for several hours. He was caught after boasting about his exploits on internet chat rooms.

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