Mafiaboy and me

I've been pretty quiet about my second book, but it's time to start talking.

Over the last couple of years, I've been working with Michael "Mafiaboy" Calce to write a book about his story. The resulting work is Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Here's the book's website, which was just launched. It will hit bookstores in Canada in late September/early October. You can pre-order it now from Chapters and Amazon.ca. (The French version will come out in November; a US edition comes out in Spring 2009.)

For those who need reminding, Mafiaboy was the alias of the Montreal teenage hacker who launched massive denial of service attacks in 2000 that brought down websites such as Yahoo!, eBay, E*TRADE and Dell. The attacks were huge news, inspiring a ton of media reports and speculation about who was responsible. President Bill Clinton even convened a special Cybersecurity Summit at the White House in the days after the attacks hit the Web.

After an international investigation that included the FBI, RCMP and other law enforcement agencies, it turned out that the person responsible was Michael Calce, then a 15 year-old kid living in a Montreal suburb. After being apprehended in a late-night raid, Mike eventually plead guilty to 56 charges related to computer crimes and was sentenced to eight months in custody and a year of probation.

Mike has never spoken publicly about the attacks or his court proceedings. The first part of the book tells his story in his own words; the second part examines our current state of online security, and how things have gotten worse since his attacks.

We're really happy with how the book turned out, and we hope it will help rasie awareness about online security, not to mention provide extremely important details about his case. Mike is going to do his first ever interview on the October 8 edition of The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. Be sure to tune in to CBC at 11 p.m. That appearance will be followed by a lot of other press.

It's going to be interesting to see how people react to Mike finally breaking his silence. I remember when I first met with him at a coffee shop in downtown Montreal back in 2006. He had gotten in touch with my agent, who then asked me to meet Mike and see why he wanted to tell his story. (At one point in my career, I spent three years working at a computer security company in Montreal, so I was a natural pick to see what Mike was all about; I had no idea if we'd end up working together.)

The first thing I asked Mike was why he wanted to write a book. It was a test. If he had said he wanted to make money or regain some of his celebrity, I would have told my agent to walk away from the project. But Mike started talking about the fact that he needed to wait all these years since his arrest in order to mature and get a better sense of himself and his crimes. (He was forbidden to do a book until he had served his probation, but that had ended years before we met.) He said he felt his story could be a cautionary tale, and that he wanted to help raise the average person's awareness about online security.

I'm sure some folks will assume he's doing this for money or fame, but those two things have never come up during the years we've worked together. I'm excited to see Mike get a chance to tell his story. I hope you'll tune in for his appearance on The Hour and, of course, buy the book.

September 19, 2008 | Filed Under Mafiaboy book 

Comments

One Response to “Mafiaboy and me”

  1. Zoltan H on November 28th, 2008 2:31 pm

    Hi,

    I just finished a review of Mafiaboy: How I cracked the Internet for YYZtech. While the first part is interesting– I like his sense of humour when talking about the famaily — in the second part I really liked how he explained the modern Internet in plain English.

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