'Mafiaboy': Cloud Computing Will Cause Internet Security Meltdown
Notorious black-hat hacker warns that cloud-based computing will be "extremely dangerous," and explains how he got into hacking at age 15

Jun 30, 2009 | 05:31 PM
By Kelly Jackson Higgins
DarkReading

Reformed black-hat hacker Michael Calce, better known as the 15-year-old "mafiaboy" who, in 2000, took down Websites CNN, Yahoo, E*Trade, Dell, Amazon, and eBay, says widespread adoption of cloud computing is going to make the Internet only more of a hacker haven.

"It will be the fall of the Internet as we know it," Calce said today during a Lumension Security-sponsored Webcast event. "You're basically putting everything in one little sandbox...it's going to be a lot more easy to access," he added, noting that cloud computing will be "extremely dangerous."

"This is not the last you're going to hear of this," he said.

Paul Henry, security and forensics expert for Lumension, says cloud computing, indeed, will open up new avenues of risk. "We haven't even handled the fundamentals of [securing it] in our existing environments," Henry said during an interview after the Webcast. "Now we're going to push it up to the cloud?"

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cloud computing, Micael Calce, Mafiaboy, hackers