A 21-year old DDoS coordinator has landed himself in trouble after being sentenced to 13 months in prison by a federal judge in North Carolina, USA.
In addition to his sentence, he is also meant to forfeit $524,000 he has accumulated from the attacks, the prosecutors said.
The prosecuted teenager, Sergiy P. Usyatuk was accused of helping in the launch of cyber attacks against a video game manufacturer, a Catholic Diocese, the US Department of Defense amongst others.
He pleaded guilty to the one-count charge of conspiring to commit computer damage and abuse. In a statement by the prosecutors, it was understood that Usyatuk has been warned several times by the FBI itself to stop the cyber-attacks.
According to them, Usyatuk refused to stop these attacks.
He conspired with an unnamed Canadian cybersecurity crook as well, to offer “booter” services that launched millions of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
DDoS attacks are a strategy used by cyber criminals to make sure website services are unavailable to people who ultimately need it. This is done by sending large amounts of fake traffic to the server until it is completely down.
This prevents legitimate users from getting access to these websites.
Previous FBI Warnings
Proofs show that he has once been warned by the FBI that DDoS attacks are illegal after he helped to take down cybersecurity website, Krebsonsecurity.
According to prosecutors’ memorandum, Usyatuk operates several hacking services that generated up to $542,925. He even boasted on a hacking website that his services had cost users 109,186.4 hours of network downtime.
He had launched attacks against more than 150 government institutions and a double that number of educational institutions. One of his attacks brought down a giant technology website.
In 2016, his Booter’s were used to launch an attack against video game servers. This attack cost the manufacturers $164,000. Later that year, his boosters were also used to facilitate an attack against Franklin Regional School in Pittsburgh.
To prevent being detected, he used many fake online identities and other sophisticated techniques.
However, nemesis caught up with him as he would spend up to 13 months in jail, and also lose a whopping amount of money.
Daniel Segun
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