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Detective Says 'Bored' Teen Coolio Admits Hacks

Los Angeles Police Department Det. Michael Brausam told Newsbytes today the youth identified by the moniker "Coolio" has admitted to three specific Web site defacements: RSA Inc., a computer security firm; the California-based anti-drug Dare.com site; and CWC.gov, the Chemical Weapons Convention site belonging to the US State Department.

However, the boy himself, speaking to the Associated Press, has denied involvement in last month's withering series of distributed denial of service attacks that crippled Web Goliaths like Yahoo, CNN.com and Amazon.com, attacks to which he has been reportedly connected.

The youth is reportedly a resident of Wolfeboro, N.H., but New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Michael Delaney told Newsbytes he could not confirm that report. Delaney also would not comment on what specific crimes the boy may have committed. The boy is not in custody, Delaney said. He said he couldn't confirm reports that the lad's computer had been confiscated as part of the investigation.

Delaney did confirm that the state's Attorney General, in cooperation with the US Attorney and FBI, is conducting an investigation regarding possible Internet-related crimes in the state of New Hampshire. "Our investigation has focused on a New Hampshire resident who has allegedly been identified in association with the online name Coolio," Delaney said.

"I guess while our efforts during this investigation have explored the possibility of a connection to the widely publicized Web site attacks on large Internet companies such as Yahoo, EBay and Amazon, the joint investigation has also explored the connection to some lesser publicized attacks in which certain Internet sites were compromised through use of a different methodology than was used in the nationally publicized attacks," Delaney said.

Among lesser-reported incidents also reportedly connected to Coolio were the credit card thefts at Toronto online shopping mall SalesGate.com, and the leak to advertisers of personal information supplied to Intuit's Quicken Web site.

LAPD Det. Brausam said he was unaware of the SalesGate or Intuit attacks.

RSA Inc. today issued a statement today denying it had been hacked, despite the recent defacement of its RSA.com site with words such as, "Trust us with your data! Praise Allah." Instead, the company said, its own preliminary investigation showed that the defaced RSA page was served up from a host computer in Colombia, where a university-owned machine was itself likely compromised. An RSA spokesman could not be reached for comment today.

Brausam told Newsbytes said he would not identify Coolio by his real name because he is a juvenile, which is typical law enforcement policy in California except in rare cases.

Brausam said that, under California state law, the youth is likely to face felony charges of unauthorized access and felony vandalism. It is unclear if he will be prosecuted for all three attacks in New Hampshire or if he would be extradited to California to face charges for defacing the Dare site, Brausam said.

The boy is also under suspicion for the widely publicized string of denial of service attacks last month.

However, the Associated Press reports, the suspect himself denies the charge, adding that he came under suspicion because friends in a chat room started a rumor that he had started the assaults, and that he wrote back "jokingly" to take credit for them. A Stanford University security official got wind of the admission, the youth told the news service, and sent logs to the FBI.

An MSNBC reporter also claims to have anonymously gained access to a chat that involved "Coolio" and some of his peers, during which the wide publicity of the denial of service assaults was addressed. Portions of the chat were reproduced on the MSNBC site. They indicate that for the most part, "Coolio" is "coy," carefully using the third-person in referring to the DoS hacks.

However, in one exchange, another chat participant slipped, the news service reported, when discussing a television report indicating that the person or persons who assailed Yahoo and other sites needed little talent to launch the assault. "They say you got no skillz," the chat-room participants said to Coolio. "Not me," Coolio responded, "you mean the hackers."

An FBI spokesman would not confirm that Coolio is a suspect in the denial of service attacks, which the organization is investigating. "It would be inappropriate for us to discuss anyone who we may have been in contact with or interviewed," said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson, "because a lot of times we interview people whether or not they are being looked at as suspects."

New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Delaney would not comment directly on any of the attacks specifically.

"I think it's fair to say we are exploring whether there is a potential connection to some of these individual attacks," he said.

The Washington Post, which did not identify Coolio by his given name, reported that the youth has used computers since the age of three, and spends 16 hours a day online. The boy was tracked down, Brausum told Newsbytes, through a digital trail he left behind on a Web site server hosted in Arizona.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, www.newsbytes.com.

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