Michael Calce: Mafiaboy and the Week Major Websites Went Dark

On Monday, February 7, 2000, Yahoo, then the biggest website on earth, buckled under a flood of junk traffic and went dark. By the end of the week Buy.com, eBay, CNN, Amazon and Dell had been knocked over too, and the FBI was hunting someone who called himself Mafiaboy.

He turned out to be a 15-year-old from Montreal's West Island who'd been bragging about the attacks in IRC chat rooms, and who gave himself away by claiming credit for the one on Dell, which nobody had reported yet.

Damage estimates ran past a billion dollars, Canadian law kept his name a secret, and the dot-com economy learned that its biggest names could be taken offline by a kid with a borrowed army of hijacked computers. Two decades later, that kid gets paid to stop people like him.

Michael Calce at a Glance

• Born in 1984 in the West Island area of Montreal, Calce was given his own computer at six, after his parents separated, and says it gave him "a sense of control and command" nothing else in his world could.
• As Mafiaboy, running with an online crew called TNT, he launched a distributed denial-of-service attack he named Rivolta, Italian for rebellion, against Yahoo on February 7, 2000.
• Over the following week eBay, CNN, Amazon and Dell went down in the same way, and the FBI called the attacks the work of an internet vandal.
• The Bureau traced him to Canada, and on April 15, 2000, the RCMP arrested him over the February 8 attack on CNN. Sixty-four more counts followed in August.
• On January 18, 2001, he pleaded guilty in Montreal Youth Court to 56 counts, and on September 12, 2001, he was sentenced to eight months of open custody, a year of probation and a small fine.
• Youth law kept him anonymous until 2008, when he published Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken with journalist Craig Silverman.
• He went on to work as a security consultant and speaker, and in 2017 HP Canada told his story in the documentary Rivolta.

The Life of Michael Calce

Calce's Early Years

Michael Calce was born in 1984 and grew up in the West Island suburbs of Montreal. When he was five his parents separated, and after a long custody fight he lived with his mother, spending every second weekend at his father's condo in the city.

He was lonely and unsettled, so his father bought him a computer of his own at six. In his memoir he remembers sitting and listening to it beep and churn as it processed commands, and the intoxicating idea of dictating everything it did.

"The computer gave me, a six-year-old, a sense of control and command," he wrote. "Nothing else in my world operated that way."

Project Rivolta

By 15, Calce was Mafiaboy, part of a hacking crew called TNT, and he wanted the group to be feared. A distributed denial-of-service attack doesn't break into anything; it simply points so many hijacked machines at a website that the servers choke on the traffic and stop answering.

On February 7, 2000, he aimed one he called Rivolta at Yahoo. The top search engine on the planet, a multibillion-dollar company, stopped responding.

Buy.com was hit the next day, an attack Calce has said was somebody else's challenge to him. He answered it by bringing down eBay, CNN, Amazon and Dell over the following week, as the internet's biggest brands discovered they had no defense against sheer volume.

Analysts rushed to put a price on the chaos. One market research firm estimated the global economic damage at $1.2 billion, a figure that's followed Calce around ever since.

Hunting Mafiaboy

Wired's headline on February 15 was "Hot On the Trail of 'Mafiaboy'," and the trail wasn't hard to follow. He'd been boasting in IRC chat rooms, and when he claimed responsibility for the Dell attack, which hadn't been publicized, he became the chief suspect.

The FBI determined that the perpetrator lived in Canada and called on its legal attaché in Ottawa to bring in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. On April 15, 2000, according to the FBI, the RCMP arrested a Canadian juvenile known as Mafiaboy for the February 8 attack on CNN in Atlanta.

That August he was charged with 64 additional counts. Under Canadian youth law he couldn't be named, so for the next eight years the most famous hacker in the country was a boy the world knew only by his handle.

The Montreal Youth Court

On January 18, 2001, Mafiaboy pleaded guilty to 56 counts, including mischief to property worth more than $5,000 against sites such as CNN.com and unauthorized access to a string of other systems.

Sentencing came on September 12, 2001. Judge Gilles Ouellet gave the 17-year-old eight months in a youth detention centre, a year of probation to follow and a fine of about $250, with his internet use restricted. The prosecutor called it "a strong message to hackers," and The Register noted that many had expected two years.

It was, by any measure, a light sentence for a week that'd rattled the dot-com economy and set the FBI on his trail. It was also about the most a Montreal youth court could give a boy who had, in the end, broken nothing that couldn't be switched back on.

Coming Out as Mafiaboy

Calce served his time, and in 2008, with the Montreal journalist Craig Silverman, he put his name to the story. Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken was published by Viking Canada, and he spent that autumn on television, from Radio-Canada's Tout le monde en parle to The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.

The book's argument was the second half of its title. The attacks of 2000 had worked because the internet was built for openness rather than resilience, and eight years on, he argued, a determined teenager could still do a great deal of damage.

He was proved right more often than he'd have liked. Denial-of-service attacks never went away; they only got bigger, until the Mirai botnet of 2016 showed what hijacked cameras and routers could do.

Calce Today

The former Mafiaboy now works on the other side of the problem, as a security consultant who tests companies' defenses and a speaker who tells boardrooms how he'd have broken in. In 2017 HP Canada released Rivolta: Inside the Mind of Canada's Most Notorious Hacker, a 20-minute documentary in which he walks through the week that made him infamous.

He's candid about the teenager he was. The point, he's said, was never money; it was to establish dominance for himself and his crew in a world where respect was the only currency.

Michael Calce: The Kid Who Broke the Internet's Confidence

Calce didn't steal anything in February 2000. What he took was the illusion that size meant safety, and the companies that lost it, from Yahoo to Amazon, spent the next two decades buying the defenses they should've had.

His sentence was eight months; the lesson has lasted far longer. Every DDoS mitigation service, every traffic-scrubbing contract and every board-level conversation about availability owes something to a 15-year-old showing off for his friends.

He grew up, and so, eventually, did the internet. It just took the internet a lot longer.