Michael Calce
Michael Calce, popularly known as “Mafiaboy,” a 15-year-old, learned how to hijack computer networks at universities in February 2000. He pooled their resources to overthrow Yahoo, the leading search engine at the time. By utilizing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault to overwhelm business servers and bring down their websites, he also shut down Dell, eBay, CNN, and Amazon within a week. The biggest shock for supporters of the internet and investors in cybercrime came from Calce’s wake-up call. Was any online data truly safe if the largest websites in the world, valued at over $1 billion, could be so quickly shut down? It is hardly overstatement to claim that Calce’s attack made the creation of cyber crime laws an urgent government priority.
Kevin Poulsen
Under the identity Dark Dante, a 17-year-old Poulsen gained access to the Pentagon’s computer network ARPANET in 1983. Despite being swiftly apprehended, the authorities chose not to press charges against Poulsen, who was still a child at the time. Instead, he was given a warning and released.
Poulsen ignored this advice and carried on hacking. Poulsen broke into the papers of Ferdinand Marcos, the ousted president of the Philippines, in 1988 after hacking into a government computer. Poulsen fled into hiding after being apprehended by the authorities. Poulsen stayed busy while he was hiding out by hacking into government databases and leaking information. He allegedly hacked a radio station contest in 1990 to make sure he was the 102nd caller, winning a brand-new Porsche, a trip, and $20,000 in the process.
Poulsen was promptly detained and given a three-year computer use ban. Since then, he has switched to white hat hacking and journalism, writing for Wired, The Daily Beast, and his own site Threat Level on cyber security and web-related sociopolitical problems. Paulson also collaborated on a number of initiatives for social justice and information freedom with other top hackers. Perhaps most significantly, he collaborated with Jim Dolan and Adam Swartz to create SecureDrop, an open-source program that was first called DeadDrop. Poulsen eventually gave the Freedom of Press Foundation access to the platform, which allowed for safe contact between reporters and sources.
