CNN.com
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.
WNYC
Michael Calce was a guest on The Leonard Lopate Show, which airs on WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820, New York’s two flagship public radio stations. Give a listen to the interview below.
He also appeared as a guest on The Takeaway along with Lt. General Harry Raduege, Jr., the former director of the Defense Information Systems Agency at the Department of Defense. They discussed the current U.S. strategy in the war against cyber attacks. Listen below.
CNN
Michael Calce appeared on CNN’s he Newsroom with Fredericka Whitfield. Watch the full interview here:
New York Daily News
Michael was also quoted in this New York Daily News story about phone phreaking:
Bluetooth hacking is popular among cyberhoodlums, said Michael Calce, a former teen hacker-turned-Internet security consultant whose autobiography, “Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man,” comes out next month.
- Deploy every defense your phone maker offers. Hackers write software to attack specific phone models and phone apps, so phonemakers create “patches” – software that combats them.
“This will only minimize risk,” Calce warned – hackers are constantly writing software that phone companies don’t know about.
Canadian Press
CBC’s The Hour hosted Michael Calce for his first ever interview. Here’s the interview:
On Thursday, October 9, Michael appeared on Canada AM. You can read an article about his interview or watch the video. He also appeared on the CTV National News that same night. You can watch the report here.
The CBC also has a story online, and you can watch a CBC TV report below and here.
PC World has published an IDG News story about Michael and the book. An excerpt:
The Internet attack took Yahoo engineers by surprise. It came so fast and with such intensity that Yahoo, then the Web’s second most-popular destination, was knocked offline for about three hours.
That was on the morning of Feb. 7, 2000. A few months later, 15-year-old Michael Calce was watching “Goodfellas” at a friend’s house in the suburbs of Montreal when he got a 3 a.m. call on his cell phone.
His father was on the line. “They’re here,” he said.
Calce knew right away what that meant. He had already talked to a lawyer after warning his father, weeks earlier, that he’d knocked offline a string of high profile Web sites — Amazon, Dell, CNN — and his attacks had been widely covered in the press.
Although the late-night visit by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was not a surprise, Calce said his mind was racing as he walked out to a street corner to wait for a police cruiser to swing by and arrest him. What was going to happen? Would he go to jail?
On October 14, CBC Radio’s The Current aired an interesting interview with Michael. You can listen to it here (scroll down to “Part Two”).
The Montreal Gazette published an interesting article, as did Canadian Press. You can also read a Globe And Mail review here.