Mafiaboy didn't even bother to cover his tracks, says Kevin Schmidt, a network programmer at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the Canadian youth allegedly hijacked a computer to attack CNN's site on Feb. 8. Falling Off a Log Network servers keep records, or logs, every time a user tries to contact them.
Smart hackers destroy the logs containing hints to their whereabouts.
Mafiaboy, Schmidt says, didn't do so. In addition, UCSB has duplicate logs in at least two places that Mafiaboy never found, he said. UCSB and law enforcement officials used the information in these back-up logs to trace his steps from the computers Mafiaboy hacked into to his home computer, Schmidt says. That wasn't Mafiaboy's only mistake. The FBI had no comment on the procedures used to trace the attacks.