Fergie's Tech Blog

'Mafiaboy' to Headline IT 360

Michael Calce, a.k.a. "Mafiaboy"

As a 15-year-old, he brought down some of the highest profile sites on the Web. Eight months of detention and eight years of silence later, Michael Calce discusses what the good guys can learn from the black hats.

The infamous 15-year-old hacker who successfully launched a series of denial-of-service attacks in early 2000 that brought down Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and CNN, among others, is coming to Toronto next month.

The attacks, which took the FBI and RCMP two months to trace back to the Montreal high school student, led Michael “Mafiaboy” Calce to plead guilty to 55 counts of mischief, serve eight months juvenile detention and remain silent for eight years.

Calce, now a 23-year-old security consultant, agreed to his first media interview last fall. This coincided with the release of his book, Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken, which Calce co-authored with journalist Craig Silverman.

But the former hacker hasn't stopped attracting controversy.

posted by Fergie @ 3/25/2009 11:36:00 PM