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.
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.
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."