Years Later Michael Calce "Mafia boy" tells the world how he did it On Feb,13th 2000

Readers digest recently revisited the " Mafia Boy " Michael Calce story , a young hacker at age 16 to exploit large networks like CNN , Yahoo , Amazon, Ebay and others. In april of 2000 Mafia boy was arrested by RCMP for hacking activities which brought down major corporations and caused havoc for AOL admins. The article was interesting as Mafia boy describes how he downloaded and decompiled yahoo's chat program looking for exploits in the program. Mafia Boy went on to describe how he found a problem in the software in the way it handled character type size and font styles and used this to take the network down punting users en mass and crippling the yahoo network by all the users coming back trying to log on at the same time effectively bringing down the network.

Mafia boy was quiet for years and then even specifically told readers digest he had use the following code to cripple yahoo's servers in Feb 13th 2000 (now 9 years ago) making Mafia boy around 25/26. "font face=999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 Insert Text which the computer doesn't seem to understand what font class style or size is , Aparrently this simple line of code caused the entire system to slowly leak memory causing a buffer overflow with the combination of users attempting to log back in from the mass exodus of chat users combined with the memory leak on their main server.

Yahoo Administrators quickly covered up by saying a tech tripped over a man lan wire on a Black Friday or Sunday causing the entire system to be down for a weekend. For the most part the public believe this however it was Mafia boy.

Mafia boy was eager to take credit for his self proclaim " Script Kiddie " behaviour as he went onto bigger and better exploits like compromising users AOL dialup accounts in order get more free service. Some more exploits Mafia boy went on to explain was how he would scan local isp netblocks for open ports on programs in which he had a compromised client configured where he would take advantage of the host. For example mafia boy scanned chat clients where he would talk to local residents of his town which never broke current domestic spying laws until he compromised the machine where he then gathered information from the victims where he then used this to log in with their AOL accounts.

Michael Calce then used his compromised accounts to continue his hacking activities and collect many servers with high bandwidth capabilities such as universities where he launched network attacks from to take out competing hacking groups on efnet. Michael Calce went on then about Mark Zuckerberg helping protect the internet and how he is worth billions and how he wanted to be like him helping the internet be more secure, bye then I had reached the end of the article and decided I had heard enough of the fantasy and suddenly got ill.