Mafia Boy was just 15 years old when he staged the Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack against commercial websites in February 2000. Companies such as Yahoo! eBay, Amazon, Dell and CNN were hit the hardest and the attack caused losses of over a billion of dollars.
A Denial of Service attack consists of sending request packets to a target that exceed the amount it is capable of answering, causing the server to need to suspend the provision of the service and that a site is interrupted by a given time. The duration range of a DoS attack can vary and can affect more than one site at a time. Also, an attack goes from Denial of Service to Distributed Denial of Service when it comes from multiple computers or vectors rather than just one.
Currently, Michael Calce (Mafia Boy) is Chairman of HP’s Security Advisory Board and Chairman of his company, Optimal Secure. He works as a “white hat” hacker, guiding companies to improve their cybersecurity, locating the vulnerabilities of their clients.
Although Calce stated in an interview that the attack he carried out at that time was aimed at gaining notoriety among the Hacker community and not for financial gain, some time after the incident he was sentenced to eight months in a juvenile detention center. Regardless of whether it was the first DoS attack documented or not, the attack was significant and left its mark on the history of cybersecurity because it revealed the lack of protection that the sites of the most important companies in the world had and how relatively simple that it had been for a young man of only 15 years to have been able to put them out of service and cause great economic losses.
There are those who say that this attack was a warning call that caused a great increase in security during the next ten years and Calce himself expressed his opinion several years later that he considers that something good came after the attack.
See also:
Captain Zap – First convicted cybercriminal
