Brit gets two years in prison for offering DDoS service and other crimes
A 20-year-old British man has been sentenced to two years in prison for providing a DDOs service called ‘Titanium Stresser’, among other offences. The paid tool was used to carry out about 1.7 million ddos attacks.
The man created the service at the age of 15, writes The Register. He is said to have earned a total of nearly £400,000 from the service. He made Titanium Stresser available for different prices. For example, customers could pay around £300 to use the service for 30,000 seconds per month over a five-year period. The tool was used, among other things, to shut down the services of Xbox Live, Teamspeak, Runescape and Minecraft. The man would have used the tool himself in the past to carry out almost six hundred DDO attacks.
The company behind Runescape, Jagex, is said to have spent about six million pounds to arm itself against the DDoS attacks. In total, more than 1.7 million DDoS attacks have been carried out on approximately 666,000 IP addresses around the world through the tool. The man claimed to have initially developed the tool to stress-test Minecraft servers, after which the development ‘got out of hand’. The man’s lawyer attributes the actions to the fact that the boy was bullied a lot at school at the time and that he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.
The judge said that he recognized that the motivation for the actions was not financial, but that the boy carried out the actions to “feel big, important and impressive”. Nevertheless, he would have known that he was committing serious crimes. The Guardian reports that the judge stated that “the punishment must have a deterrent effect” and that he did not want to waive a prison sentence. Reports from the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit indicate that his sentence amounts to 24 months in prison for carrying out DDO attacks himself, 9 months for running the service and another 24 months for money laundering. He is serving all those sentences at the same time.