One of the creators of the tools that have been used to make attacks against popular online services such as Xbox Live, Minecraft and TeamSpeak, has been jailed for two years.
Adam Mudd, the creator of the Titanium Stresser program, was just 16 when he set up a hacking business that sold the program to cyber criminals, which was responsible for over 1.7m attacks.
Overall he earned the equivalent of more than $386,000 in US dollars and bitcoins, although due to Mudd's previously undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome, he was reportedly more interested in his online status than the financial gain.
The judge at Mudd's sentencing, Michael Topolski QC, noted that Mudd came from a "perfectly respectable and caring family" when the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were carried out between December 2013 and March 2015. Topolski added that Mudd's crimes had wreaked havoc "from Greenland to New Zealand, from Russia to Chile".
Mudd, now 20, carried out nearly 600 DDoS attacks against 181 IP addresses over a 16 month period. Prosecutor Jonathan Polnay said there were over 112,000 registered users who in turn hacked around 666,000 IP addresses. One of the targets was MMO RuneScape, which endured 25,000 attacks. Cambridge-based Jagex spent £6m trying to defend itself from these attacks, with a revenue loss of £184,000.
He also admitted to security breaches against West Herts College, where he was studying computer science, and in 2014, another 70 schools and colleges including Cambridge, Essex and East Anglia universities, along with local councils, were targetted.
The court heard that the "bright and high-functioning" defendant understood that what he did was wrong, but at the time lacked empathy due to his medical condition. When it came to sentencing, the judge said: "I have a duty to the public who are worried about this, threatened by this, damaged by this all the time ... It's terrifying."
Thanks, The Guardian