MafiaBoy
A fifteen-year-old in Montreal knocked Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, CNN, and Dell offline over a single week in February 2000 — and bragged about it in a chat room.
In February 2000, a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks took down some of the biggest names on the early commercial web. Yahoo — then the most-visited site on the internet — went dark for hours. Over the following days the same treatment hit Amazon, eBay, CNN, Dell, and E*TRADE. The financial press estimated aggregate damages in the billions and treated the events as an assault on the credibility of e-commerce itself.
A teenager with borrowed firepower
The perpetrator turned out to be a fifteen-year-old in Montreal using the handle MafiaBoy. He had not written sophisticated tools. He had used publicly available DDoS scripts and a collection of university computers he had previously compromised, pointing their combined bandwidth at one target at a time. The technical bar was low. The visibility was enormous.
He was identified largely because he could not resist talking. He discussed the attacks in IRC channels and effectively claimed credit before investigators had a suspect, giving the RCMP and FBI the thread they needed. He pleaded guilty in 2001 and was sentenced, as a minor, to months in juvenile detention.
What the chronicle remembers
MafiaBoy is the case that introduced the general public to distributed denial of service. It established two durable patterns at once: that internet-facing commerce had a structural availability weakness anyone could exploit with off-the-shelf tools, and that operational security failure — bragging — remains the most reliable way attackers get caught.