A 12-year-old from Canada has pleaded guilty to hacking into government and police websites during the 2012 Quebec student. He carried out the attacks in collaboration with Anonymous.
According to the Toronto Sun, the boy, who lives in a suburb of Montreal, appeared in court on Thursday, accompanied by his father.
The mischievous little one admitted his guilt to three charges concerning the piracy of websites of Montreal, the Police, the Institute of Public Health of Quebec, the government of Chile and some others.
The attacks took down websites for at least two days and police estimate that $60,000 worth of damage was caused.
The boy's lawyer told the court that the 12-year-old's actions were not politically motivated:
He saw it as a challenge , he was only 12 years old . … There was no political motive .
The article states that the young hacker has been dealing with computers since he was 9. It also states that the websites suffered three different types of attacks:
- Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS)
- Deface (Distortion of pages). See Pastebin for a message posted on the Montreal police website in French and English.
- Exploiting security vulnerabilities to gain access to the servers' databases.
The young hacker is said to have managed to obtain personal data belonging to users and administrators of the sites. According to the Toronto Sun, he exchanged the information obtained from his attacks for video games.
