The Hacker Diaries

Download or read book The Hacker Diaries written by Dan Verton and published by McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media. This book was released on 2002 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many who knew him, there was nothing odd about him. He was a normal kid ... On February 7, 2000, Yahoo.com was the first victim of the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever to hit the Internet. On May 8th, Buy.com was battling a massive denial-of-service attack. Later that afternoon, eBay.com also reported significant outages of service, as did Amazon.com. Then CNN's global online news operation started to grind to a crawl. By the following day, Datek and E-Trade entered crisis mode ... all thanks to an ordinary fourteen-year-old kid. Friends and neighbors were shocked to learn that the skinny, dark-haired, boy next door who loved playing basketball--almost as much as he loved computers--would cause millions of dollars worth of damage on the Internet and capture the attention of the online world--and the federal government. He was known online as "Mafiaboy" and, to the FBI, as the most notorious teenage hacker of all time. He did it all from his bedroom PC. And he's not alone.