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When he was just 15 years old, Michael Mafia Boy Calce managed to shut down several major websites

including CNN, Dell, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and ETrade with a series of denial of service attacks. Now,
more than a decade later, he talks about how the hacker culture has changed and what users can do to protect
themselves.

How He Toppled the Web Giants


In 2000, Calce targeted CNN.com after another hacker claimed the site would be impossible to bring down
because of its "advanced networks" and "huge traffic numbers." He managed to slow down CNN's site for
nearly two hours.
Denial of service attacks involve bombarding a site or application with so many requests that the server is
unable to keep up. Calce modified a denial of service attack written by another hacker and trained
approximately 200 university networks under his control to a specific target.
The attack against Yahoo was by accident, Calce said. He had put in the IP addresses into the script, and then
gone to school, forgetting the script was still running. He came home to find his computer had crashed, and
didn't realize what had happened until he heard the news reports later.
His own activities, Calce admitted, were "illegal, reckless and, in many ways, simply stupid". He added that
he really had not understood the consequences of his actions.

"It's So Easy It's Scary"


More than a decade later, it's easier to launch attacks now than it was then, Calce said. A lot of the companies
are completely unaware that they are at risk, and that needs to change.
Back when he was actively targeting sites, you had to work and build your own arsenal of tools before
launching an attack. Now there are hacker desktops and ready-to-use tools that anyone can download, install,
and implement. "If you're interested and you want to be a hacker, you can be a hacker in 30 minutes", Calce
said.

Different Mentality, Motivations


Calce and his fellow hackers were driven by curiosity and desire to understand how things worked. That is
where the term hacker originated, after all. A hacker refers to anybody interested in manipulating
technology to do something other than its original purpose. "That's not necessarily a bad thing", Calce said.
"At that point in time, everyone was running tests and seeing what they could do and what they could
infiltrate", remembered Calce.

The current generation, however, is motivated by money, or desire to destroy. "It's much more about
monetary gain, whereas we were pushing the status quo", Calce said, pointing out that even when there
doesn't seem to be an obvious financial motive, that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec are a "different breed", Calce said. While they have
political motivations, some of them do also have malicious goals. They are not pure white-hat or pure black-
hat, but more grey-hat hackers, Calce said. "I don't condone what they're doing, but I understand their
point". He believes hacktivism will become a bigger phenomenon since people have figured out how to use
technology to fight back and draw more attention to their cause.

Safe Security Online


With attack motivations shifting to monetary gain, the attack focus has also shifted, and individual users are
just as likely to be targeted as large companies.
Users need to use strong passwords to protect their accounts. They need to be long and complex. Password
managers help keep track of strong passwords, Calce said.
They should also think about installing personal firewall software on their computers to block malicious
traffic. A firewall can also warn you when an application is trying to access the internet. If you are not using
Bluetooth, it should be turned off so that other devices cannot connect to your computer.
And finally, users should beware of open wireless networks because it is incredibly easy to eavesdrop on
what you are doing, and people don't realize this, Calce said.
Hacking will never go away, and users can take some steps to protect themselves, but ultimately,
organizations need to invest in security to protect their end users, Calce concluded.

Who is MafiaBoy?

Michael Calce is a
Canadian IT security
consultant. In early
2000, aged 15 and under
the alias of Mafiaboy,
Calce shut down Yahoo,
the Webs top search
engine at the time, for
almost an hour with a
denial of service
attack. He also brought
down the websites of
CNN, Amazon, eBay and
Dell. He wrote about
these exploits and his
subsequent arrest in his
book "Mafiaboy: A
Portrait of the Hacker as
a Young Man."

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