If you are one of those unfortunate online gamers who have experienced a Denial of Service attack, here’s a welcome bit of justice. Adam Mudd, a 20-year-old from the UK, has been sentenced to jail for two years for creating software responsible for hacks on Sony and Microsoft networks between 2013 and 2015, while he was still a teenager.
Mudd plead guilty to the charges, and now faces two years in prison. According to report made by The Guardian, the Titanium Stresser program he created is responsible for 1.7 million attacks across various gaming websites, including Minecraft, Xbox Live, and RuneScape, as well as TeamSpeak, a chat tool for gamers.
Prosecutor Jonathan Polnay has said that Mudd’s program has 112,000 registered users, who have hacked over 600,000 IP addresses, with 53,000 of those coming from the UK alone. Mudd himself has earned more than 300,000 pounds from selling his malware to cybercriminals online.
Even though this all happened while he was a teenager, Judge Michael Topolski said Mudd “knew full well this was not a game. The judge noted that even though he came from a “perfectly respectable and caring family,” his criminal actions caused chaos worldwide. According to the report made by BBC News, Mudd, who has autism, will be serving his sentence in an institution for young offenders. While some may see the jail sentence as too harsh a punishment, the judge insisted on it, to serve as a warning to any other would-be “hackers.”
During the sentencing, the judge told Mudd:
I’m entirely satisfied that you knew full well and understood completely this was not a game for fun… It was a serious money-making business and your software was doing exactly what you created it to do.
Hopefully, the threat of real jail time will deter further DDoS attacks in the future.