MafiaBoy
A fifteen-year-old took down Amazon, Yahoo and eBay from his bedroom
In February 2000 Michael Calce, a fifteen-year-old in Montreal using the name MafiaBoy, ran a distributed denial-of-service campaign against some of the largest commercial sites on the internet — Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, CNN, Dell and E*Trade among them — using networks of compromised university machines.
Yahoo was the largest search engine on the internet at the time and was unreachable for hours. He was traced partly because he boasted about it in chat rooms, and pleaded guilty to dozens of charges in juvenile court.
The first demonstration that availability was a business-critical property, that commercial scale was no defence, and that a teenager with borrowed capacity could impose real losses on the largest companies online.
The Hacker Chronicles
Volume Two — Going Pro
This page is the summary. The chapter — ‘MafiaBoy’ — follows the case properly: what was known at the time, who decided what, and how it actually unfolded rather than how it was later retold.
Two more volumes this year.
Going Geopolitical in October, Going Strategic in December.
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