“A computer hacker has been jailed for two years for masterminding global online attacks as a teenager from his bedroom in Hertfordshire,” BBC News reports. “Adam Mudd, now 20, admitted creating malware in 2013 which was used to carry out 1.7 million cyber attacks.”
“Judge Michael Topolski said Mudd ‘knew full well this was not a game,'” The Beeb reports. “Mudd, who has autism, will serve his sentence in a young offenders institution. The judge said he could not suspend the jail term because he needed the sentence to be a ‘real’ deterrent to others.”
“Mudd was 16 when he developed a programme called Titanium Stresser, the court heard. He set it up using a false name and an address in Manchester,” The Beeb reports. “It had 112,000 registered users, who in turn attacked 666,000 IP addresses globally. The attacks, known as ‘distributed denials of service’, left companies paying millions to defend themselves against it.”
“The teenager earned more than £386,000 worth of US dollars and Bitcoins from selling the programme to international cyber criminals,” The Beeb reports. “The Old Bailey heard that he also personally carried out 594 attacks, including one on West Herts College where he was studying computer science.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And now, even more, your name is Mudd.
(Come on, we had to!)
Moral of the story: Do not mastermind global DDoS attacks.
Another (cyber) scoundrel like Harcourt Fenton Mudd.
Stella, shut up!
Mixed feelings: on the one side, I want to believe hackers should get at least one year in complete isolation in a cell with NO contact other than food, water, etc.
On the other side, I admire his talent, compared to the high school kids I work with who believe themselves to be expert hackers just because a friend gave them their Facebook password, LOL. Expert gamers but can’t remember how to save a word processing document and want me to retrieve it. Yeah right!
Not that talented, he got caught.
Really talented ones never make the news.
And people say young kids these days can’t do anything.
MI5 should employ him before another country’s intelligence agency make him a better offer, a bit like Frank Abagnale Jr in the US.
They will, only more covertly. Once in jail he “disappears” from public scrutiny and he’s free to recruit.
Only 2 years?!
Agreed. He made hundreds of thousands. Hell, smoke a joint in Texas and you get 20 years. This guy deserves a lot more — and NO ACCESS to anything with a chip in it.
So no access to your shoulder then, I thank you.