"Every criminal is jumping on this bandwagon...there's less risk than robbing a bank in person. That's why they are leaning toward cybercrime."Thus sayeth Michael Calce, a.k.a. Mafiaboy, who as a 15 year old took down CNN, Yahoo!, E*Trade, Amazon, and E-Bay, back in 2000. In a post written in my first week of blogging, I described the evolution of hacking:
...
"Now it's all terrorism and monetary gain"
1995 - "Napoleon Dynamite" hacking: "Girls want boyfriends with skills ... Bow hunting skills ... Nunchuck skills ... Computer hacking skills."The girls at Sexy Hacking could not be reached for comment.
2001 - Bragging rights hacking: I was actually at the Infosec computer security conference in 2003 when Fluffy Bunny was marched out in handcuffs by the Police. I always thought that he was one of the funnier of the web site defacers.
2006 - Hacking for Dollars. Malware (Spam, Phishing, electronic credit card theft, etc) is now a Billion dollar industry, attracting serious talent and funding (Mafia, etc). The Bad Guys are better funded than we are. Game Over.
It's been quite a while since kids got into this game for intellectual exploration. Now it's astonishing the amount of money in cybercrime. Maybe Mafiaboy shouldn't have rehabilitated himself.
1 comment:
"Black points to an incident in 1999 where a group of Scottish hackers
subtly changed a Scottish government Web site to make it look like
Scotland was declaring war on Wales."
That is funny right there.
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