Ankit Kumar Agarwal

MafiaBoy is Back!!!

Yes he is back!!!The 16- year old kid who brought down the internet biggies like yahoo and CNN.com to there knees way back in 2000.Michael Calce reintroduces himself in his new book.

If you dont know whom i am talking about,you may like to know about ten biggest legends of hackers on universe first.

Most people, even the computer illiterate, know him as Mafiaboy, the online nickname he used while causing havoc on the Internet in 2000 by temporarily shutting down websites like Yahoo.com and CNN.com.

By bombarding such e-commerce goliaths with a series of information overloads, known as denial-of-service attacks, Calce caught the undivided attention of an industry very high on its potential in 2000. Not bad for a 15-year-old boy working from a personal computer in his father’s home in tranquil Ile Bizard.

But his book, Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why it’s Still Broken, co-written with Montreal journalist Craig Silverman, is not a boastful tale.

“The ultimate goal of the book is to say, ‘Here is my story. This is what I experienced.’ Hopefully, it will prevent a Mafiaboy 2.0,” said Calce, slipping in a computer reference likening a potential hacker to a software update. Now 23, Calce hopes to return to school and continue his current work as a computer consultant.

“I want to get the message across that I realize what I did was wrong so hopefully other people won’t do the same thing. I wanted to let the reader become me and see what I went through. Hopefully, when they read this they’ll say, ‘I don’t want to go through what this kid went through.’ Nobody should lose four years of their life,” he said, referring to the length of time he was caught up in the justice system.

Full of many behind-the-scenes surprises, the book is a remarkably detailed account of Calce’s life leading up to the attacks and what happened to him afterward. He was arrested by the RCMP and dragged through a media frenzy while experts tried to grasp what he had actually accomplished. He was charged, eventually pleaded guilty, and spent eight months in a youth home.

Although his identity was protected in Canada under legislation protecting young offenders, several U.S. media outlets published his name.

At the start of the investigation, speculation placed Mafiaboy among the most sophisticated hackers on the Internet. By the time of his arrest, Calce was criticized among his peers and police who ranked him as a “script-kiddie,” or an amateur hacker.

While serving as a cautionary tale, the book also challenges those opinions.

It details how Calce methodically stole bandwidth from hundreds of computers while preparing for his first attack on Yahoo.com, which was merely intended as a test to impress experienced hackers he admired.

“Obviously, (the RCMP) downplayed what I did, which is fine. I don’t resent it and it doesn’t bother me. Let them say whatever they want to say. I know the truth and I felt the story was misinterpreted,” Calce said.

“Even some IT security experts came forward and said ‘it’s rather easy to do what he did.’ I don’t know what these people were doing when they were 15 years old. But when you’re 15 and you’re breaching university (computer networks), making a network, preparing to launch a denial-of-service attack, I don’t think it’s easy at all.”

“It was weird. (The RCMP) didn’t want people to panic, but at the same time, they were saying any 15-year-old could do this.”

The book is more than just a rehashing of events. It is at times a very personal look at the realities of a young teenager growing up among divorced parents while simply not fitting into the structured environment of high school. Silverman interviewed several of Calce’s friends and closest relatives while also researching the background of the RCMP’s investigation.

The book is not just about how Calce saw the world while it was so interested in him back in 2000, but also about how the world saw him.

“There is some touchy stuff in there. But if you’re going to do the book, you have to sort of go all the way. You have to lay everything out,” Silverman said, while acknowledging not everyone will like Calce as a teenager.

“There are parts of his life that aren’t flattering. There are parts where he was obviously doing bad things. They are in there. That’s another thing that makes the book worth doing. I didn’t get any push back from Michael to leave those things out. The flaws are in there. It is not a whitewash, and, hopefully, people will see it as a cautionary tale and not a celebration of what happened. That would be the worst-case scenario.”

Calce agrees that the best approach was to show his life as it was back then, warts and all.

“We didn’t try to make it look like I was a good guy,” he said. “I admit to being a trash talker and admit to being immature. But what do people expect from a 15-year-old?”

you may like reading:-Ten biggest legends of hacker universe.

source:internet