Criminal Justice 3100
Joseph D. Bishop
9/6/2014
Research Paper

Our assignment in Criminal Justice 3100 was to research and write a paper about famous hackers. This topic is something that greatly interests me. Hackers are typically associated with being able to identify security issues with computers, software and databases, hacking can occur in almost any medium. I decided to research a hacker named Denis Moran also known as Coolio. Denis Moran was born April, 14, 1982 in Massachusetts. Denis Moran also known by his alias Coolio, was a computer hacker from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, who was accused of a series of denial-of-service attacks that shut down some of the most popular websites on the Internet. . Later Moran was arrested and pled guilty to defacing the websites of DARE and RSA Security, as well as illegally accessing the U.S. Army and Air Force computer systems at four military bases. On February 7, 2000, a smurf attack generating over 1 gigabit per second of ICMP traffic was launched against Yahoo!. This attack caused yahoo websites to shut down for hours. In a message sent to the CERT, a Yahoo! network engineer by the name of Jan B. Koum said that the attackers were "above your average script kiddie" and "knew about our topology and planned this large scale attack in advance." On March 5, 2000, the FBI raided Moran's house and seized his computers. Despite the incriminating chat logs and contents of his computers. Coolio was charged as an adult with 7 counts of Class A Felony unauthorized computer access of a computer. Almost a year later Moran pled guilty to 4 counts of misdemeanor unauthorized access and spent 12 months in jail. Moran