MafiaBoy

Michael Calce (born 1986, also known as MafiaBoy) was a high school student from West Island, Quebec, who launched a series of highly publicized denial-of-service attacks in February 2000 against large commercial websites, including Yahoo!, Fifa.com, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. He also launched a series of failed simultaneous attacks against 9 of the 13 root name servers.

Calce was born in the West Island area of Montreal, Quebec. When he was five, his parents separated and he lived with his mother after she had won a lengthy battle for primary custody. Every second weekend he would stay at his father's condo in Montreal proper. He felt isolated from his friends back home and troubled by the separation of his parents, so his father purchased him his own computer at the age of six. It instantly had a hold on him: “I can remember sitting and listening to it beep, gurgle and churn as it processed commands. I remember how the screen lit up in front of my face. There was something intoxicating about the idea of dictating everything the computer did, down to the smallest of functions. The computer gave me, a six-year-old, a sense of control and command. Nothing else in my world operated that way."

On February 7, 2000, Calce targeted Yahoo! with a project he named Rivolta, meaning “riot” in Italian. Rivolta was a denial-of-service attack in which servers become overloaded with different types of communications to the point where they shut down completely. At the time, Yahoo! was a multibillion-dollar web company and the top search engine. Mafiaboy's Rivolta managed to shut down Yahoo! for almost an hour. Calce's goal was, according to him, to establish dominance for himself and TNT, his cybergroup, in the cyberworld.Buy.com was shut down in response. Calce responded to this in turn by bringing down eBay, CNN, Amazon and Dell.com via DDoS over the next week.

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