Michael Calce

Early Life

Michael Demon Calce was born in 1984 in the West Island area of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. When he was five years old, his parents separated, and he went to live with his mother following a lengthy custody dispute, spending every other weekend at his father's condo in Montreal. Feeling isolated and unsettled by the family upheaval, he received his first computer from his father at the age of six. By his own account, the experience of controlling a machine had an immediate and profound effect on him, offering a sense of command that little else in his life provided at the time.

Hacking Career and Project Rivolta

Calce, operating under the online alias Mafiaboy, became active in hacker communities and affiliated himself with a cybergroup called TNT. On February 7, 2000, at the age of fifteen, he launched a DDoS attack against Yahoo! — then the world's leading search engine and a multibillion-dollar web company — under a project he named Rivolta, the Italian word for "rebellion." The attack rendered Yahoo! inaccessible for nearly an hour.

In the days that followed, Calce brought down eBay, CNN, Amazon.com, and Dell through similar distributed denial-of-service methods. Buy.com was also targeted in a related attack during the same period, though Calce denied responsibility for that specific incident, attributing it to another hacker. He also attempted simultaneous attacks against nine of the thirteen root name servers, though those efforts failed.

In a 2011 interview, Calce offered a revised account of events, claiming the attacks had been launched inadvertently after he input target addresses into a security tool downloaded from the file-sharing platform Hotline. He stated he left for school while the application continued running, and only pieced together what had occurred after hearing news reports upon returning home.

Arrest and Sentencing

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began tracking Calce after he made claims of responsibility in IRC chatrooms. He became the primary suspect when he referenced bringing down Dell's website — an attack that had not yet been reported publicly. Calce initially denied involvement but ultimately pleaded guilty to more than 50 charges.

On September 12, 2001, the Montreal Youth Court sentenced him to eight months of open custody, one year of probation, restricted internet access, and a small fine. His lawyer argued that Calce had merely been running unsupervised tests to help design a better firewall, while trial records indicated he had shown little remorse and had expressed interest in relocating to Italy due to its comparatively lenient computer crime laws.

Estimates of the economic damage caused by the attacks varied widely. A senior analyst at the Yankee Group cited figures of US$1.2 billion in global damages, a number that circulated widely in media coverage. However, the trial prosecutor presented the court with a figure of approximately $7.5 million.

Significance

The attacks drew significant attention to the vulnerability of commercial internet infrastructure. Testimony before the United States Congress by computer expert Winn Schwartau warned that government and commercial systems were effectively defenseless. The fact that a fifteen-year-old had disrupted some of the largest websites in the world contributed to a broader loss of consumer confidence in online commerce. Former CIA agent Craig Guent has credited the Mafiaboy incidents with spurring a substantial increase in online security practices over the following decade.

Later Years

During the latter half of 2005, Calce wrote a computer security column for the French-language publication Le Journal de Montréal. In late 2008, he announced, alongside journalist Craig Silverman, that he was co-authoring a book titled Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken, which received generally positive reviews upon release. That same year, he appeared on the Quebec television program Tout le monde en parle to discuss the book. He also appeared on Last Call with Carson Daly to speak about his hacking activities and their consequences. In 2014, Calce was featured on the twelfth episode of the Criminal podcast.