Scourge · February 7 2000

The Scourge of Mafiaboy

Chronicle

On 7 February 2000 a 15-year-old Canadian calling himself Mafiaboy, Michael Calce, aimed a botnet of compromised university computers at Yahoo! and knocked it offline. Over the following days Amazon, CNN, Dell and eBay fell too, names that had seemed unshakeable. Calce was tracked down partly because he bragged in chat rooms, and in 2001 he was sentenced to eight months in youth detention.

Lesson learned

The world learned that web giants could be toppled by a teenager with enough of other people's machines, and DDoS became a boardroom problem.

Prayer of reparation

O Mafiaboy, who only wanted to show who was boss, teach us to measure our incoming traffic and never to leave university servers open to passers-by. Amen.

How it is remembered

Remembered with rate limits, egress anti-spoofing filters and a DDoS mitigation plan agreed before it's needed.