Redazione RHC : 18 October 2025 21:33
Today we’ll learn about another great black hacker from the past. We’ll talk about Michael Calce, better known as Mafiaboy, one of the most famous and sought-after hackers in the world. He’s a Canadian hacker who carried out numerous hacking operations against major multinationals in the 2000s when he was 14 years old.
Michael Calce was born in 1984 on the West Island of Montreal, Quebec. When he was five, his parents separated, and he lived with his mother after she won a long custody battle.
Every other weekend, Michael stayed at his father’s apartment in Montreal, even though he felt isolated from his friends and his mother’s house. Being so distraught over his parents’ separation, his father gave him his first computer at the age of six.
“I was a pretty naughty kid,” Michael said. “I come from a divorced family. My dad had custody on the weekends and didn’t know how to look after me, so he took a computer from his office and brought it home and said, ‘Now figure out what to do with it.'”
This gift made Michael immediately happy, in fact this novelty had a great impact on him and he said:
“I remember sitting and listening to it beep, gurgle, and wiggle as it processed commands. I remember how the screen lit up before my face. There was something intoxicating about the idea of typing on the computer, 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 worked that way.”
Up until that point, no problems, in fact Michael began to learn about programming and the command interface, but when he connected his terminal to the Internet, everything suddenly changed.
A few years later, Michael got a free trial subscription to AOL. He was 9 years old and it was his first time connecting to the internet, and within a few days, he managed to hack the system so he could surf beyond the 30-day trial period.
Being on the Internet, between bulletin boards and IRC channels, he became swept away by an interest in hacking and became increasingly involved in online hacker groups of all kinds. In fact, he said:
“He equates hacking with a drug. That very moment when you breach a network and gain administrative access is intoxicating. For me, the thrill drove me to succeed.”
He also reported years later that:
“The whole hacker community used to be about notoriety and exploration, whereas today you look at criminal hackers, and it’s all about monetization.”
He gave himself his nickname, Mafiaboy, a sort of “Pseudonym” or “nickname”, around the age of 15, following a series of violations he committed which we will discuss in the next chapter.
On February 7, 2000, when he was 16, the self-acclaimed MafiaBoy targeted Yahoo! with a project he called Rivolta. Rivolta consisted of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack in which servers were overloaded with requests until they eventually stopped responding. At the time, Yahoo! was a multimillion-dollar web company and a leading search engine, obviously predating Google. Using Rivolta, Mafiaboy managed to take down Yahoo! for nearly an hour.
But Michael’s goal wasn’t profit; it was simply to assert himself and his hacker group in the cyberspace. In fact, Calce also took down eBay, CNN, and Amazon, again using distributed denial of service (DDoS) techniques. Calce also attempted to take down Dell’s website, but was unsuccessful.
In a 2011 interview, Calce said that these attacks were launched unintentionally after he entered known addresses into a security tool he downloaded from a repository on the now-defunct file-sharing platform developed by Hotline Communications.
Calce said he headed to school, forgetting about the app, which continued to attack websites for most of the day. When he returned home, Calce says he found his computer crashing after a reboot, unsure what had happened during the day.
He said that when he heard the news on TV and reconstructed that those URLs were the ones included in the program, he “began to realize what could have happened.”
The damage caused by these service outages is estimated to have caused financial losses of $1.7 billion to the 16 hacked companies.
For the US national security apparatus, Michael’s attack was a wake-up call. President Clinton convened a cybersecurity task force. Attorney General Janet Reno announced a manhunt for Mafiaboy.
“You know, I’m a pretty calm, collected, nice person, but when the president of the United States and the attorney general basically call you and say, ‘We’re going to find you,’ at that point I was a little worried.”
Calce said, and he was right to be worried. The FBI was on his trail.
Calce says the FBI was hot on his heels and had identified where he lived:
“I started noticing this van parked at the end of my street, like Sunday at 4 a.m. It was pretty obvious they were watching my house.”
He was eventually arrested, and the case ultimately went to trial in Canada, where Calce is from. The Clinton administration sent cybersecurity experts to testify.
“It was quite an ordeal,” Calce said. “It didn’t really matter what I said at that point. They just wanted to make an example of me.”
He was charged with more than 50 crimes and was eventually sentenced to eight months in a group home.
Today, Michael Calce is what’s called a white hat hacker. Companies hire him to help identify security flaws in their systems and design better security features.
He says the Internet is a much scarier place today than it was in 2000. For one thing, there’s more and more at stake as we rely more and more on online systems for our daily lives.
Looking back, he thinks some good came from the attack he launched.
“I raised a lot of issues,” he said. “What I certainly succeeded in doing was bringing attention to computer security and the inherent flaws that come with computers and the Internet.”
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