German teen admits eBay hijack
2004-09-04 14:16
Helmstedt - A 19-year-old German student has admitted being responsible for the hijacking of the German eBay auction site for 40 hours last week, police said on Saturday.
Frank Federau, spokesman for Lower Saxony state criminal police department, said police searched the home of the student's parents in Helmstedt on Friday and seized a computer hard disk.
The man, who was not named, is being investigated on charges of data espionage and computer sabotage.
Federau said the student was "not a computer freak" but had "for fun" applied to re-register the domain ownership of the eBay site as well as google.de, web.de and amazon.de.
"He was himself amazed to receive the news that he was now the new owner of the Internet address eBay.de," Federau said.
The disturbance of the eBay site last weekend cut off bidders from thousands of auctions in the closing stages.
Experts had voiced astonishment that a series of domain- registration checks failed, and that someone identified in media reports as Frank S was able to become the registered owner of ebay.de, one of the world's most valuable domain names.
Visitors to ebay.de found themselves on Friday August 27 looking at a group gaming site. The host server soon crashed under the vast tide of visits, but the true eBay Germany was not back online until Sunday morning.
Police believe the student had applied to a German Internet service provider, Intergenia, to become owner of the eBay domain.
An automated request went to the Frankfurt Internet registry, Denic, which sent an automated alert to Tucows, a Canadian firm responsible for the genuine eBay site. When there was no reply, the domain name was transferred.
Holger Bleich, editor of German computer magazine c't, said the main damage would have been suffered by sellers whose automated auctions ended at tiny prices because of the absence of buyers.
However, eBay said its system was "not compromised and user data was not endangered".
Although the student comes from Lower Saxony, police said there appeared to be no link with the 18-year-old student from the state who earlier this year unleashed the Sasser virus onto the Internet.
- SAPA