ge of six. It instantly had a hold on him: “I can remember sitting and listening to it beep, gurgle and churn as it processed commands. I remember how the screen lit up in front of my face. There was something intoxicating about the idea of dictating everything the computer did, 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 operated that way."[3]
Project Rivolta
On February 7, 2000, Calce targeted Yahoo! with a project he named Rivolta, meaning “riot” in Italian.[3] Rivolta was a denial-of-service attack in which servers become overloaded with different type of communications to the point where they shut down completely.[4] At the time, Yahoo! was a multibillion dollar web company and the top search engine.[5] 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.[3] Buy.com was shut down in response. Calce responded to this in turn by bringing down Ebay, CNN, Amazon and Dell.com via DDoS over the next week.
In a 2011 interview,[6] Calce tried to redeem his image by saying 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 would then have left for school, forgetting the application which continued the attacks during most of the day. Upon coming home Calce found his computer crashed, and restarted it unaware of what had gone on during the day.[7] Calce claimed when he overheard the news and recognized the companies mentioned being those he had inputted earlier in the day, that he "started to understand what might have happened".[6]
Aftermath
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police first noticed Calce when he started claiming in IRC chatrooms that he was responsible for the attacks. He became the chief suspect when he claimed to have brought down Dell's website, an attack that had not been publicized at that time.[citation needed] Information on the source of the attacks was initially discovered and reported to the press by Michael Lyle, chief technology officer of Recourse Technologies.[8]
Calce initially denied responsibility but later pled guilty to most of the charges brought against him.[9] 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.[10] 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.[1][11]
Matthew Kovar, a senior analyst at the market research firm Yankee Group, generated some publicity when he told reporters the attacks caused US$1.2 billion in global economic damages.[12] Media outlets would later attribute a then-1.45:1 conversion value of CAD $1.7 billion to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Computer security experts now often cite the larger figure[13] (sometimes incorrectly declaring it in U.S. dollars),[14][15] but a published report says the trial prosecutor gave the court a figure of roughly $7.5 million.[10]