It was the decade of the mega-heist, when stolen credit card magstripe tracks became the pork bellies of a new underground marketplace, Eastern European hackers turned malware writing into an art, and a nasty new crop of purpose-driven computer worms struck dread in the heart of America.

Now that the zero days are behind us, it’s time to reflect on the most ingenious, destructive or groundbreaking cybercrimes of the first 10 years of the new millennium.

2000 MafiaBoy

Michael "Mafiaboy" Calce

Once upon a time, “distributed denial of service attacks” were just a way for quarreling hackers to knock each other out of IRC. Then one day in February 2000, a 15-year-old Canadian named Michael “MafiaBoy” Calce experimentally programmed his botnet to hose down the highest traffic websites he could find. CNN, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Dell and eTrade all buckled under the deluge, leading to national headlines and an emergency meeting of security experts at the White House.

Compared to modern DDoS attacks, MafiaBoy’s was trivial. But his was the cyberstrike that put the internet’s security issues on a national stage, and inaugurated an era where any pissed off script kiddy could take down part of the web at will.