Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 9
Understanding the situational awareness in cybercrimes
The DDoS attacks impacted on the Church of Scientology's website which went 
down on a number of occasions in late January (
Kaplan, 2008; Vamosi, 2008
). As a 
result the 
scientology.org
website was moved to a safeguarding company to prevent 
further DDoS, however the attacks against the site increased and consequently was 
once again inaccessible (
Kaplan, 2008
). Anonymous in a press release and video 
declared “war on scientology” advising that it would continue its attacks in order to 
protect freedom of speech (see Youtube 
Anonymous 2008
Message to Scientology).
Whilst this case could fall under the categorization of “religion” the underlying 
reasons for the attacks are much more complicated. Whilst publicity does play a 
part in the campaign, claims relating to morals are a key justification for the attacks. 
This case is also interesting because it is not restricted to online attacks but also 
direct action. Ethical hacktivists such as Anonymous maintain that they are fighting 
for the moral high ground aiming to seek quality of life for others as well as world 
improvement.
SELF-ACTUALIZATION: THE CASE OF “MAFIABOY”
Michael Calce (Mafiaboy) was a 15-year-old Canadian school student when he car-
ried out a series of DDoS attack on several major corporations including Yahoo, 
eBay, CNN, Dell and Amazon in 2000. Calce started by targeting Yahoo in an opera-
tion he called Project Rivolta (meaning Riot in Italian) his goal being to establish 
dominance for himself and TNT, his cyber group (
Calce, 2008
).
Genosko (2006)
 said of the case:
He wasn’t a programmer. He acquired an automated “rootkit” written by some-
body else and then set it to work “anonymously.” Mafiaboy executed a Distributed 
Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) – a “flood” of messages (packets) that by vol-
ume alone disabled servers unable to cope with the demands placed upon them –
with borrowed script, in this case, a denial-of-service program authored by 
“Sinkhole” (although early press reports fingered a creation by a “mixter” called 
Tribal Flood Network). He planted a number of DOS agents on “zombies” – hi-
jacked computer systems at universities, and remote-controlled the operation with 
his automated software, using the captured computers to inundate selected Web 
sites with data packets (numbered chunks of files).
This was a groundbreaking case of cybercrime at the time and proved that inter-
net security needed to be drastically improved given that the largest website in the 
world (Yahoo in 2000) could be shut down by a 15-year-old. The hacks provided 
evidence that there were major holes in internet security and this was used as a part 
of his argument for defense: he wanted to expose such faults and become a computer 
security specialist.
Calce admitted that he committed the attacks out of curiosity. “At that point in 
time, everyone was running tests and seeing what they could do and what they could 
infiltrate” (
Infosecurity, 2013
). Whether this was motivated by self-actualization, 

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