MONTREAL - A Montreal teenager credited with launching online attacks eight years ago that delivered a sucker punch to some of the world's Internet giants of the day is finally telling his tale.
Known on the web and in the headlines under his Internet alias Mafiaboy, Michael Calce was just 15 when he was arrested by the RCMP at his father's home in a luxurious Montreal suburb.
Calce later pleaded guilty to 56 charges and spent eight months in a group home, but he says in a book about his exploits to be released this week that the ordeal of being thrust into the spotlight caused him to lose a good part of his teenage years.
Calce and journalist Craig Silverman are releasing "Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken," which he describes as a cautionary tale that looks at his hacking past as well as the current state of personal security on the Internet.
"I stayed silent for eight years, I wanted to come to terms with my crimes and I gained a new perspective on it," Calce, now 23, said in an interview. "I just needed to enlighten myself, to take the time to understand the gravity of what I did."
His denial-of-service attacks crippled the websites of Yahoo Inc., EBay, CNN, Dell and Amazon.com, causing millions of dollars in losses and kicked off an international manhunt including the RCMP and the FBI.
The book goes into great detail about his crimes and outlines why others shouldn't follow in his footsteps - a Mafiaboy 2.0 as Calce calls it.
"The book has two parts - the first part reads like a true crime story," said Silverman, a Montreal journalist who first sussed out Calce a few years ago to understand his intentions before the pair started writing.
"The second part of the book is a look at how bad things have gotten since what he did in 2000, and it's aimed at the average Internet user. It's not a technical book about hacking written for computer security experts."
The book includes Mafiaboy's guide to Internet security as well as personal tips reminding everyday Internet users that the web wasn't designed with security in mind.
"The idea is to convey a message to the general public that it's crazy how people are putting their whole life online - online banking, Facebook, dating," Calce says.
"The technology is becoming more and more incorporated in our life and it's becoming less and less secure. I see a big problem there and I want to bring this issue to the public."
Experts have hotly debated the level of sophistication of Calce's attacks. The police and some in the hacking community downplayed his work as that of an amateur hacker.
Calce challenges that in the book.
"I'm surprised it hasn't happened again because it's easier today than it was back then," Calce says. "(The fact there hasn't been a repeat) indicates to me that what I did is obviously not as easy as people say it is."
Calce, who comes across as an angst-ridden teen in the book, says the high-profile arrest and subsequent trial and time in a youth home took its toll.
"It wasn't easy to deal with, it took a chunk of my life away because I had to appear in court, I had conditions, I couldn't see my best friends," Calce said.
"I didn't like the situation and I wouldn't want anyone to go through what I went through, but at the same time I learned a lot from it and it made me mature much quicker."
Calce and Silverman admit readers may not necessarily like the version of the brash, surly teen that came across in the trial, but both writers were intent on staying true to the story.
"It's very open to the point of being surprising to people about what was going wrong in his life," Silverman said. "He doesn't paint it with rose-coloured glasses . . . it's a real portrait and in some cases you can say he is the real bad guy, but what people tend to forget is that he was 15 years old when it happened."
Calce has dabbled in Internet security and worked as computer consultant in recent years and hopes to be able to continue to move forward from his hacker past and preach about personal web security to the masses.
"This is what I was designed to do, ever since I was born, computers were encoded in my DNA," Calce says.
