Mafiaboy: The 15-Year-Old Who Knocked Yahoo and Amazon Offline

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In February 2000, Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, eBay, and Dell were knocked off the internet within days of each other. Authorities feared sophisticated cyber terrorism. The culprit was Michael Calce, a 15-year-old from the Montreal area who went by Mafiaboy. This episode starts with his childhood: his parents separated when he was five, and at six his father gave him a computer to fill the weekends at the condo. A machine that obeyed every command offered a kind of control his home life did not.

On February 7, 2000, he launched what he called Project Rivolta, flooding Yahoo with traffic from hijacked university and corporate computers and shutting it down for nearly an hour. The motive was a turf war: status for himself and his crew, TNT. The episode weighs his later claim that the attacks were an accident against the week-long timeline, then follows the chat room bragging that led to his arrest, his light sentence, and his later career as a security expert.

• He was labeled a script kiddie because he used attack tools written by others, and he also went after the internet's 13 root name servers, disrupting nine of them.
• He boasted in an IRC chat room about hitting Dell before the attack had been publicly reported, which made him the prime suspect for the FBI and the RCMP.
• He pleaded guilty to over 50 charges, and in late 2001 the Montreal Youth Court gave him eight months of open custody, a year of probation, restricted internet access, and a small fine.
• Damage estimates ranged from the prosecutor's $7.5 million to a Yankee Group analyst's $1.2 billion, and trial records showed he had researched moving to Italy for its lax computer crime laws.
• By 2005 he was writing a security column for Le Journal de Montréal, and in 2008 he published a book on how he broke the internet.