Libsyn:
https://sites.libsyn.com/488183/episode-5-mafia-boy-a-hacker-prodigys-redemption-story
YouTube:
Rumble
https://rumble.com/v3y8pf4-episode-5-mafia-boy-a-hacker-prodigys-redemption-story.html
Notes:
Episode 5 – Michael Calce AKA MafiaBoy
· From Canada, parents separated, would spend every second week with his father
· Father was busy with work, would keep Michael occupied with Rubik’s cubes, Lego, problem problem-solving toys.
· 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.
· Michael was obsessed with the computer and at age six was reading coding books and hardware books
· Had a 30-day trial for AOL, and eventually found AOHELL which allowed him to appear as an admin. Socially engineered other AOLchat users for their login details, discovering social engineering age 9. Said this experience was the “beginning of the rabbit hole”
· Eventually found IRC. He was an avid gamer, but couldn’t afford to buy games, and came across an IRC channel that was distributing pirated games
· A hacking group was running the channel and was recruiting. Michael applied but was told he was too young. He decided to prove himself by hacking into a game developer’s website and getting game files, and the group recruited him.
· Michael and the group were hacking anything they could, university networks, any website they came across. Felt like hacking was a drug, intoxicating breaching a network
· Over the next few years had built a reputation and was recruited by TNT, a hacking group with a reputation for being elite. He rose up through their ranks quickly despite being 13.
· DDOS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) became popular around this time. Disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target
· This was the year 2000, the height of the eCommerce boom, eCommerce stocks were trading high
· He established teams within TNT to write their own DDOS scripts. He named this project Rivolta, ‘Revolution’ in Italian.
· Rivolta lasted 8 days in total, and the first target was Yahoo, the biggest search engine at the time.
· Michael had left the DDOS tools running while he was at school, which took out Rivolta. Over the following 8 days, Rivolta took down eBay, CNN, Amazon, Dell, and a number of other sites
· Rivolta caused $1.7 Billion dollars’ worth of damages.
· FBI were investigating, President Clinton addressed the attacks in an address. FBI used a number of tactics, including putting plants in IRC rooms. There were 16 FBI task forces trying to track MafiaBoy down, with assistance from the Mounties.
· Eventually caught (reused username), pleaded guilty to over 50 charges brought against him.
· The Montreal Youth Court sentenced him on September 12, 2001 to eight months of “open custody,” one year of probation, restricted use of the Internet, and a small fine.
· The extent of the $1.7 Billion dollars’ worth of damages wasn’t realized at the time, and the trial prosecutor gave the court a figure of roughly $7.5 million.
· Testifying at a hearing before members of the United States Congress at the time, computer expert Winn Schwartau said that “Government and commercial computer systems are so poorly protected today they can essentially be considered defenceless – an Electronic Pearl Harbor waiting to happen.”
· Former CIA agent Craig Guent credits Mafiaboy for the significant increase in online security that took place over the decade.
· When he had served his time, Michael mostly became a spokesperson and consultant for cybersecurity. Currently works as a freelance white hat hacker, companies hire him to break into their systems. He wrote a book, ‘Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It’s Still Broken.’
· Strongly emphasises that security is still sketchy, and how it’s worse today.
· Feels it’s easier to hack things now because software has more lines, its more complex, more mistakes appear.
· Market only cares about getting new things released, products are developed quickly, not structurally sound etc. “It’s a hackers paradise right now.”
· Believes everybody is a target
· Feels like phishing is the natural successor to what he did on things like AOL chat, getting an accountant of a big company to click a link etc. Warns constantly about public Wi-Fi.
· “The Exploit is the human being”
· Compared being robbed physical versus digitally, “people don’t feel it, computer crime”.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/02/07/384567322/meet-mafiaboy-the-bratty-kid-who-took-down-the-internet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Calce
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia-BtKzx0So https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDDg48CFlEk