Mafiaboy: the teenager who knocked big websites offline

The story

In February 2000, a series of attacks took down some of the best-known websites in the world: Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Dell, E*TRADE and CNN. For hours, people trying to reach them got nothing.

The attacks were denial of service attacks. Instead of breaking in, the attacker took control of many computers at universities and other organizations and had them all send traffic to one website at the same moment. The sites were overwhelmed by the flood.

Investigators traced it to Michael Calce, a 15-year-old in Quebec who went by “Mafiaboy” online. He had boasted about the attacks in chat rooms. He was sentenced as a juvenile and later worked in security.

What changed afterward

The attacks showed that any company doing business online depended on staying reachable, and that a single person could disrupt them by borrowing other people’s computers. Governments and businesses started treating attacks on availability as a real threat.

The lesson today

Attacks that flood a service with traffic still happen, now often from hijacked cameras and routers. For most businesses, the lesson is closer to home: computers and devices that are not kept up to date can be taken over and used against others, and against you.