It’s been about 20 years since one of the first documented Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks was born. The person responsible was Michael Calce, a 15-year-old Canadian young man, who on February 7, but in 2000, carried out a series of Denial of Service attacks directed at various ecommerce platforms, such as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, among others. great sites called MafiaBoy.
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 be forced to suspend the provision of the service and causing a site to be 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 changes from Denial of Service to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) when it comes from multiple computers or vectors rather than just one.
Michael Calce, better known by his pseudonym, Mafiaboy, was in 2000 a young man from Quebec who in February began a series of DoS attacks that affected sites such as Yahoo, Amazon.com, eBay, Dell Inc., CNN, etc. According to various sources, the attack meant economic losses totaling $ 1.7 billion, and in the case of Amazon specifically, the costs of the attack meant a loss of between $ 200,000 and $ 300,000 per hour due to the inability to make purchases by part. of clients, published in a Taylor & Francis report.
Regardless of whether it was the first documented DoS attack 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. Some say that this attack was a wake-up call that caused a great increase in security during the next ten years and Calce himself expressed his opinion several years later that he believes that something good came after the attack.
