Distributed DoS hacker sentenced in Germany

The German computer hacker responsible for creating the software used to render ineffective some of the largest Web sites on the Internet in February has been sentenced to a 6 months probationary youth sentence for unrelated computer crimes according to German press reports.

The youth, who has not been named but uses the handle "Mixter," was reportedly found guilty by a court in Hannover of gaining unauthorised access to the computer systems of a number of companies and "spying on data" in 1998.

Mixter's notorious program "Tribal Flood Network" has been blamed for rendering sites such as Yahoo!, eBay and CNN inaccessible in February by deluging them with a massive amount of fake traffic from a number of remotely controlled machines.

This technique, dubbed a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, has caused considerable consternation among Internet security professionals because it is so difficult to stop.

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