Just over a decade ago, Michael Calce knocked CNN.com offline. Today, the site published an interview with him about the release of his book. Doug Gross of CNN.com spoke with Michael about the attacks he launched in 2000, how hacking has evolved since then, and the best ways for people to protect themselves online. Read it all here. An excerpt:
Michael Calce once briefly shut down this site.
It was February 8, 2000, and the then-15-year-old was egged on by a fellow hacker who believed CNN.com would be impossible to bring down because of its “advanced networks” and “huge traffic numbers.” It took Calce just a few minutes.
“The sense of power I felt was overwhelming,” he wrote later of the attack, which slowed CNN.com’s news operations for nearly two hours. “It was also addictive.”
By then, the Canadian teen better known as “Mafiaboy” had already made national headlines by toppling Yahoo!, eBay and E*TRADE with a brazen series of denial-of-service attacks, which usually involve barraging a website with so many requests that its servers are overrun.
It’s a story he tells, breaking years of silence, in “Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man,” which chronicles Calce’s rise to becoming arguably the most famous, or infamous, computer hacker ever.