What Enterprises can learn from Project Revolta by Mafiaboy

In the early 2000s, a curious teenager called “Mafiaboy” cracked the internet. He executed a massive Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) attack that took down Yahoo!, eBay, CNN, Amazon, and Dell. Here is what the project Revolta was all about, and what companies can learn from it, to stay safe.

Project Rivolta

On February 7, 2000, Michael Calce (Mafiaboy) launched the project Rivolta, meaning “rebellion” in Italian. He first targeted Yahoo! and then brought down eBay, CNN, and Amazon over the next week.

The attack inundated servers with a vast volume of requests, drowning these servers with more traffic than they could handle. This made it impossible for them to respond to legitimate user requests, effectively taking them offline.

As per a paper published on Research Gate, The Case of ‘Mafiaboy’ and the Rhetorical Limits of Hacktivism,” Calce wasn’t a programmer. He obtained an automated “rootkit” written by somebody else and then set it to work “anonymously.”

He executed a DDOS attack with a borrowed script. In this case, a DoS program authored by Sinkhole. Although early press reports fingered a creation by “mixter” called Tribal Flood Network.

He planted several DOS agents on “zombies,” which are hijacked computer systems connected to the Internet. He then remote-controlled the operation with his automated software. He then used the zombies to attack selected websites with data packets. These events marked the Internet’s first big wave of DDoS attacks.

The attack caused an estimated USD 1 billion in damages, turning Mafiaboy into one of the most wanted overnight.

Motivation

As per his documentary, “Rivolta: Inside the Mind of Canada’s Most Notorious Hacker, “the first time he accessed the Internet was probably the most exciting point of his life.”

At age 6, he got his first computer. Between 6 and 9, he read programming books, construction books, hardware, and software. He liked reverse engineering things.

Over the first few weeks of using the computer, he went from knowing nothing to using DOS commands. Calce spent days reading manuals to gain knowledge and put it into practice.

A few years later, he got his first free trial of AOL. A few days later, the 9-year-old managed to hack AOL’s systems to stay online past the 30-day trial period—pretty remarkable for his age, right? Years later, what motivated him to execute such an attack? A blend of curiosity and a desire to prove his technical abilities.

Read more about this article in-depth: The Curious Case of Mafiaboy