Today, England’s Old Bailey court gaoled 20-year-old hacker Adam Mudd two years for initiating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against several popular games and gaming services, the BBC reports.
Mudd created the malware Titanium Stresser when he was 16 and, in the intermittent years, several thousand users have carried out an alleged 1.7 million attacks against services like Xbox Live. Minecraft, Runescape and other games were compromised by Titanium Stresser, which was marketed as a legal stress test for online services. In reality, the software spammed online services with enough data to cripple their ability to function. (For more on how DDoS attacks work, read our story.)
Mudd accrued nearly $US400,000 ($530,709) from selling access to the software for $US2 ($3) to $US310 ($411), depending on the plan. Mudd allegedly initiated nearly 600 DDoS attacks on his own. The BBC reports that one attack he led was against the university where he studied computer science.
In November, Mudd pleaded guilty to violating Britain’s Computer Misuse Act, which protects against digital security breaches. He was arrested in his bedroom, at his parents’ place.
Comments
6 responses to “Hacker Gaoled Two Years For Making Software That Causes DDoS Attacks”
Living the stereotype.
Ha!
You can tell the BBC reported it because it was Gaoled instead of Jailed
Good. Jail time is appropriate imo. A clear message needs to be sent to these people.
Two years seems low considering the money he made and the number of attacks he was responsible for. I wonder if the money was seized as proceeds of crime?
Apparently the BBC article says he’s autistic and will serve his sentence in a “young offenders’ institution”. I guess maybe his mental condition influenced the sentencing.
Two years doesn’t seem like much to you or I. It probably feels a lot longer to the person getting forcibly sodomised on a daily basis for the duration of those 2 years.