“I was fascinated that more capability existed, the ability to overload with data to sever the connection. I went down the rabbit hole,” said Calce.

He soon graduated from AOL to IRC chat, looking for more cracked games to download. Finding long lines of people waiting to download the pirated software, he started looking for ways to skip the line. By this time he was losing focus in school, sleeping through class and staying up all night online. Eventually he found an IRC channel that was recruiting hackers, and convinced the leader to let him learn and give him a chance. He was 11 years old.

“I felt privileged that someone was willing to give me a chance,” said Calce. “It's really hard to start out in the hacking industry.”

The group was looking for hackers to co-opt public high speed networks like schools and use them as servers to distribute pirated software. It was all about notoriety, he said, not public gain.

“Back when I was hacking the objective was just to hack something to say you'd hacked it,” said Calce. “Today, everything is about monetary gain. Hackers have completely changed their psyche.”