Michael Demon Calce or as he is better known as Mafia Boy is a hacker that was famous in 2000 or launching a series of denial of service attacks on some of the internet's most popular websites. He posed a serious threat through Project Rivolta meaning riot in Italian he threatened the websites of Yahoo!, Amazon, Dell Inc, E*TRADE, eBay and CNN. His aim was to 'establish dominance for himself and his group TNT. The two main threats that Project Rivolta posed were firstly to shut down the previously mentioned websites and if that was to happen those websites would lose perhaps thousands/millions of pounds combined in revenue.
Impact
The project did have a large impact on 7th February 2000 Mafia Boy managed to shut down Yahoo for 1 hour by overloading the servers with different types of communications up to a point they shut down completely. Over the next week the same fate befell CNN, Amazon, Dell and eBay. It is estimated that the shutting down of these websites caused a combined $1.7 billion in damages almost crippling the websites in question.
ResolutionThe suspicions of the FBI were raised when Calce started to claim he was responsible for the attacks over Internet Relay chat (IRC) chat rooms. After at first denying responsibility he later pleaded guilty to all of the charges brought against him and on September 12th 2001 the Montreal Youth Court sentenced him to 8 months of custody, one year of probation, restricted access to the internet and a fine.
References
http://hackstory.net/Mafiaboy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1541252.stm
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