“I though oh geez, was this a fluke, did I literally shut down Yahoo?” said Calce. “I figured I'm already in this deep so why not see how far I could go. I just couldn't believe Yahoo had gone down.”

And reading people on IRC taking credit for his attacks, he realized maybe he had another way to end the hacker war: if people knew he was capable of shutting down Yahoo and CNN, maybe they'd back up and lay down arms.

Then he started reading about losses for e-commerce companies in the billions, and it was a bit beyond his comprehension, he said. When U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and President Bill Clinton got involved, he knew he was in serious trouble.

“When the President of the United States holds a meeting about something you've done and you're 15 years old, you know you've done something wrong at that point,” said Calce.

Saying he was just a “misguided youth who had too much power at his fingertips,” Calce said he has reformed his ways after serving an eight-month open sentence, one year of probation, paying a small fine and was being restricted in his use of the Internet.