I shut radio site, boasts teen hacker

By CHRIS BARTON

A teenage hacker attacked an online chatroom run by The Edge radio station and then turned his attention to TV3's website.

The 15-year-old, who goes by the online name of "deejay-fuzion" and attends Roturua Lakes High School, rang the Herald to brag about his exploits.

Asked why he launched a "DDOS" (distributed denial of service) attack against the chatroom on Monday night, he said: "Because the administrator was ... just being a smart arse."



"Dj-fu" signalled his "bots" to flood the chatroom computer with spurious internet traffic, causing the server to slow down and eventually stop.

During the process he noticed other servers belonging to TV3 were in the same proximity so he tried his attack on TV3's website - "just because I could". (Radioworks, which owns the Edge, and TV3 have the parent company CanWest).

TV3 communications manager Roger Beaumont confirmed The Edge chat server had a DDOS attack and was offline for a short period. But he said it was coincidence that TV3's website was offline on Tuesday for routine maintenance.

Will Steele, a friend of the 15-year-old who was online at the time, said the TV3 site was unavailable during the attack and the "routine maintenance" message appeared on the site after the attack ended at 9.45pm. That was when the hacker was taken offline by his internet provider, Quicksilver.

Its network manager Mark Frater said two individuals were disconnected on Monday night after the internet provider received a complaint from a server administrator.

When contacted by Quicksilver, both denied knowledge of an attack and had their internet accounts reinstated.

Quicksilver manager Trevor Isted said there was no proof to link the pair to the attack. Usage logs were being investigated, and if evidence was found, the pair would be banned from access for breaching the internet provider's acceptable use policy.

The teenager claims to have written a trojan program called "FB3" with a friend known online as "lynx".

The program exploits a "Netbios" vulnerability in Windows PCs related to file and print sharing, to plant itself on unsuspecting users' computers.

The infected computers (bots - short for robots) signal their presence to a computer in the United States which the teenager uses to send out the instructions to attack.

In this case the method of attack was a "SYN flood" - an efficient process which fakes the initial handshake of an internet connection with false addresses which the target Machine is unable to answer.

It keeps retrying to accept them, and with enough of these happening, a server can become overwhelmed.

New anti-hacking provisions - including clauses covering DDOS attacks - in the Crimes Amendment Bill are waiting to be introduced to Parliament.

But the hacker would be immune from prosecution because he is only 15.