Mixter is a computer security specialist. Mixter first made the transition out of the computer underground into large-scale public awareness, in 2000, at which time newspapers and magazines worldwide mentioned a link to massively destructive and effective

distributed denial of service In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host conne ...

(DDoS) attacks which crippled and shut down major websites (including

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Buy.com Rakuten.com/shop was an e-commerce marketplace based in San Mateo, California. Previously known as Buy.com, it was founded in 1997 by Scott Blum. In 2010, it was purchased by Japanese company Rakuten, and rebranded as Rakuten.com.Claire Cain Mil ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

E-Trade E-Trade Financial Corporation (stylized as E*TRADE) is a financial services subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, which offers an electronic trading platform to trade financial assets. The company receives revenue from interest income on margin balan ...

, MSN.com,

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

ZDNet ZDNET is a business technology news website owned and operated by Red Ventures. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991, as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication. H ...

and CNN).Hacker inquiry leads to Germany
, ''

BBC News Online BBC News Online is the website of BBC News, the division of the BBC responsible for newsgathering and production. It is one of the most popular news websites, with 1.2 billion website visits in April 2021, as well as being used by 60% of the ...

'', February 13, 2000. Early reports stated that the FBI-led

National Infrastructure Protection Center The National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) was a unit of the United States federal government charged with protecting computer systems and information systems critical to the United States' infrastructure.Gale Encyclopedia of Espionage ...

(NIPC) was questioning Mixter regarding a tool called '' Stacheldraht'' (Barbed Wire). Although Mixter himself was not a suspect, his tool, the "Tribal Flood Network" (TFN) and an update called TFN2K were ultimately discovered as being the ones used in the attacks, causing an estimated $1.7 billion

USD The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

in damages. In 2002 Mixter returned to the public eye, as the author of Hacktivismo's Six/Four System. The Six/Four System is a

censorship Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...

resistant

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematic ...

proxy Proxy may refer to: * Proxy or agent (law), a substitute authorized to act for another entity or a document which authorizes the agent so to act * Proxy (climate), a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest in climate re ...

. It works by using "trusted peers" to relay network connections over

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encrypted links. As an example, the distribution includes a program which will act as a web proxy, but all of the connections will be hidden until they reach the far end trusted peer.Mixter. "The Six/Four System; A Decentralized Anonymous Peer-To-Peer Network Infrastructure With Trust," README file in Six/Four distribution, 2003.

References

{{reflist Computer security specialists Living people Year of birth missing (living people)