Michael Calce

In 2014, Calce appeared on the twelfth episode of the Criminal podcast.

In a 2011 interview, Calce claimed that the attacks had been launched unwittingly, after inputting known addresses in a security tool he had downloaded from a repository on the now defunct file-sharing platform Hotline, developed by Hotline Communications. Calce left for school, forgetting the application which continued the attacks during most of the day. Upon coming home Calce says that he found his computer crashed, and restarted it unaware of what had gone on during the day. Calce claimed that when he overheard the news and recognized the companies mentioned being those he had inputted earlier in the day, he "started to understand what might have happened".

In late 2008, with journalist Craig Silverman, Calce announced he was writing a book, Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken.

On October 26, 2008, he appeared on the television program Tout le monde en parle to discuss his book. The book received generally positive reviews.

During the latter half of 2005, he wrote a column on computer security topics for Le Journal de Montréal.

Calce initially denied responsibility but later pleaded guilty to most of the charges brought against him. His lawyer insisted the child had only run unsupervised tests to help design an improved firewall, whereas trial records indicated the youth showed no remorse and had expressed a desire to move to Italy for its lax computer crime laws. The Montreal Youth Court sentenced him on September 12, 2001 to eight months of "open custody," one year of probation, restricted use of the Internet, and a small fine.

On February 7, 2000, Calce targeted Yahoo! with a project he named Rivolta, meaning "rebellion" in Italian. Rivolta was a DDoS (distributed-denial-of-service) attack in which servers become overloaded with different types of communications to the point where they become unresponsive to commands. At the time, Yahoo! was a multibillion-dollar web company and the top search engine. Mafiaboy's Rivolta managed to shut down Yahoo! for almost an hour. Calce's goal was, according to him, to establish dominance for himself and TNT, his cybergroup, in the cyberworld. Buy.com was targeted in a similar attack afterwards that has been attributed to Calce. Calce claims he was not responsible and that a different hacker performed the DDOS as a challenge to coax him into targeting other websites. Calce responded to this in turn by bringing down eBay, CNN, Amazon, and Dell via DDoS over the next week.

Michael Calce (born 1984, also known as MafiaBoy) is a security expert and former computer hacker from Île Bizard, Quebec, who launched a series of highly publicized denial-of-service attacks in February 2000 against large commercial websites, including Yahoo!, Fifa.com, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. He also launched a series of failed simultaneous attacks against nine of the thirteen root name servers.