Young Hackers’ Plot to Sabotage Internet Investigated by FBI

Federal authorities in Los Angeles disclosed Thursday that they are investigating an international conspiracy of young computer enthusiasts who had discussed causing “serious chaos” on the Internet on New Year’s Eve.

Although the FBI has seized computers and related equipment in several states, no one has been arrested in the United States in connection with the case.

Four Israelis have been arrested in that country on suspicion of planning to disrupt computer systems, the FBI and Israeli national police said.

The FBI is analyzing mountains of computer data and other alleged evidence seized during several searches, including one in Southern California that gave the Los Angeles bureau jurisdiction in the case.

One teenager under investigation had boasted on his World Wide Web site that the plot to attack communications hardware on the Web would “take down the Internet,” authorities said.

That 16-year-old boy, however, said the case is overblown and based on his misguided efforts to impress his buddies in cyberspace.

“I was just running my mouth, trying to brag,” said the Lynnwood, Wash., youth, who uses the Internet alias Booterror--a term for an unsuccessful boot-up of a computer hard drive.

“I wasn’t serious,” he said from his home in Snohomish County. “It was teenage talk, is what it was.”

The Times is not identifying the youth because he is a minor.

“I’ve been throwing up nonstop,” he said, insisting he has done nothing wrong. “I feel like I’m going to hurl again.”

FBI Says It’s Hard to Answer Teenager

The FBI has taken the youth’s Internet boastings very seriously.

A team of more than a dozen agents knocked on the door of his mother’s house at 6 a.m. Dec. 22 with a search warrant and left with computers, floppy disks, CD-ROMs and other items as evidence.

Special Agent Matthew McLaughlin, a spokesman for the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said it is difficult for federal authorities to respond to the teenager’s claims that the FBI is exaggerating the case’s significance because agents thwarted the alleged attacks before they could occur.

“Search warrants are obtained based on evidence. And if that evidence indicates that a serious crime may be on the verge of happening, the FBI is compelled to investigate that aggressively,” McLaughlin said, noting that a federal judge approved the warrants. “At this point we are analyzing this rather complex body of evidence we’ve gathered and are working closely with the U.S. attorney’s office to determine if any suspects should be charged in this matter, and if so, with what.”

The teenagers, with such aliases as Doork, Deadkode and Sorcerer--from California, Michigan, Washington state and Israel--are suspected of trying to inject a malicious computer code into the so-called Web servers that form the communications backbone of the Internet, FBI documents said.

That would allow them to essentially shut down chat rooms and other realms of the Internet, and even gain access to some people’s computers, authorities said.

In an affidavit, FBI Special Agent John Pi of the Los Angeles computer crimes squad said the bureau was initially contacted by Dalnet, an international provider of chat rooms on the Internet.

The company said some users of those chat rooms--including Booterror and an Israeli using the name Hell--had disabled some of their computer systems and were discussing cyber terrorism in some chat rooms.

The FBI found a Web site operated by Booterror in which he said he’d created a program called “godswrath” to “take down the Internet on New Year’s Eve 2001,” Pi’s affidavit states.

Booterror, Pi wrote, was looking for others to join in his effort, so he could spread the program “all around the world and start causing serious chaos.”

Booterror said he and some Internet chat friends spent only half an hour on “godswrath,” and then forgot about it--until the FBI showed up.

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Lynn Marshall, a Times researcher in Seattle, contributed to this story.