"Calce estimates that he had hacked into perhaps 40 percent of the major universities in the United States, _using attack code that he picked up online_"
and
"_He took denial of service attack code written by_ a hacker named Sinkhole and developed a way to remotely train all of his approximately 200 university networks on the same target simultaneously, he said."
I think some users are confusing Hacker News with Script Kiddies News.
yeah, that's fine. script kiddies run scripts that other people make. but very few people can say that they took down yahoo. i mean, that's not a typical script kiddie success story, is it?
talk him down all you want, but i remember what it was like when this guy was doing his work (however you want to judge it.) he made headlines. script kiddies don't make headlines, what they do has already been done and automated before them. there was something original to his work, even if he was just using an original combination of scripts. that makes him a hacker, imho.
How many script kiddies have taken down Yahoo or eBay?!
This is a classic case of someone hustling. He got caught and now he's saying he's just someone who used someone else's tools and is just a nobody who played around... all to lessen the blame for the crime he committed so he gets a lighter sentence.
What kind of self respecting hacker would admit to the cops "yeah I'm a super kick ass hacker with mad skills" and risk invoking more punishment/hassle?
This is one reason why its so important to keep your home computer secure. A single cable connection doesn't do much, but tens or hundreds of thousands can easily bring down a big site.
It takes half a brain to build a botnet to DDOS. It takes much more skill to be on the other side protecting against these attacks. Good for Mafiaboy.
"Calce estimates that he had hacked into perhaps 40 percent of the major universities in the United States, _using attack code that he picked up online_"
and
"_He took denial of service attack code written by_ a hacker named Sinkhole and developed a way to remotely train all of his approximately 200 university networks on the same target simultaneously, he said."
I think some users are confusing Hacker News with Script Kiddies News.