When Hackers Fight
A leet hacker recounts an epic pwning
By Michael Calce
Originally published at Nautilus on October 10, 2013.
Many subcultures revolve around secret codes — but none do it quite like computer hackers. In our peculiar corner of the world, everyone’s identity is masked by a codename, and the lingua franca relies heavily on coding jargon. When we hackers unite to work towards a common goal, our codes can have enormous power. But, as is true in many cultures, we wield our codes to most devastating effect when we are in conflict with each other.
When I was 15 years old, the codename I was known by in my clandestine online circles was Mafiaboy. It was an apt description. My crowning glory was to shut down Yahoo!, eBay, CNN, Dell, and Amazon, all within a single week, causing more than $1 billion in damage. Bill Clinton and Janet Reno organized a conference on cyber-security in response to my handywork. I was proud of myself at the time, though I couldn’t have done it without the community of hackers I belonged to. That was where I learned most of my skills.
We would gather on Internet Relay Chat, or IRC — a legitimate public chatroom that had an underground layer.¹ If you were just an ordinary IRC user, you wouldn’t know where to find us because it would require using quite a few specific…
