Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 3. C

Calce, Michael “MafiaBoy”

Michael “MafiaBoy” Calce (1984–), of Montreal, Canada, made his name as a malicious hacker, conducting a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against corporate websites in the year 2000. A DDoS attack is when multiple computers overwhelm an entity on a computer network with more packets or datagrams than it can handle, forcing the entity to shut down. Web servers are the most common targets.

In an interview with NPR, Calce says he was motivated by competition with other cyberattackers: “The overall purpose was to intimidate other hacker groups. The whole of the hacking community was all about notoriety and exploration, whereas you look at hackers today and it’s all about monetization.”

Calce fell in love with computers when his dad got him his first PC at age six, around 1990. He learned how to hack past AOL’s 30-day free-trial limit, then learned about DoS attacks through AOL chat rooms.

His first DDoS attack briefly took down Yahoo! in February 2000, when Yahoo! was as central to the web as Google is now. The next day, one of Calce’s rivals took down Buy.com. Calce responded by DDoSing eBay the following day. Then someone in one of Calce’s IRC chats suggested that CNN would be difficult to DDoS because its network was so advanced. So Calce successfully targeted CNN, then Dell, and then Amazon.

Law enforcement was hot on Calce’s trail. As Calce told NPR: “You know, I’m a pretty calm, collected, cool person, but when you ...