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 cyberattack 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
Yahoo!
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
,
Buy.com,
eBay
eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...
,
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
,
E-Trade
E*TRADE is an investment brokerage and electronic trading platform that operates as a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley.
History
In 1982, physicist William A. Porter and Bernard A. Newcomb founded TradePlus in Palo Alto, California, with $15,00 ...
,
MSN.com,
Dell
Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...
,
ZDNet and
CNN
Cable News Network (CNN) is a multinational news organization operating, most notably, a website and a TV channel headquartered in Atlanta. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable ne ...
).
[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 U ...
'', February 13, 2000. Early reports stated that the FBI-led
National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) was questioning Mixter regarding a tool called ''
Stacheldraht'' (Barbed Wire).
Although Mixter himself was not a suspect, his tool, the
Tribe 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: $; currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it int ...
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 governmen ...
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
Mathematics
...
proxy. It works by using "trusted peers" to relay network connections over
SSL 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
External links
Personal website
{{Cult of the Dead Cow
Computer security specialists
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Cult of the Dead Cow members