Posted on April 26, 2017 at 12:35 PM

Teen hacker that attacked Runescape and Minecraft sentenced to 2 years in prison

A few things on the internet are as fast and as damaging as DDoS attacks. What they do is redirect thousands, of sometimes even hundreds of thousands of different machines, and make them all bombard a single server at the same time, and basically pound it until it collapses. These attacks are extremely damaging and very much illegal, and so everyone who decides to do something like that will be hunted down by security companies.

This is exactly what happened earlier this week, after a creator of Titanium Stresser, a DDoS service, was caught and sentenced to two years long prison sentence.

Many were surprised to find out that a hardened online cybercriminal was just a teen, but the UK’s Adam Mudd, despite being little more than a kid, did more than simply make and launch DDoS attacks. He also allowed others to use it as well. His Titanium Stresser was described as “a simple-to-use service that let paying customers to launch crippling online attacks against Web sites and individual Internet users… According to U.K. prosecutors, Mudd’s Titanium Stresser service was used by others in more than 1.7 million denial-of-service attacks against victims worldwide, with most countries in the world affected at some point.”

Many different things were affected by these attacks, including Microsoft services, MMO Runescape and even Minecraft. It’s been discovered that the developers at Runescape actually spent around £6 million while attempting to stave off the attacks performed by DDoS. There were several charges against Mudd, including ‘committing unauthorized acts with intent to impair the operation of computers’, ‘concealing criminal property’ as well as a charge of ‘making, supplying, or offering to supply an article for use in an offense contrary to the Computer Misuse Act.’ He pleaded guilty to all of them.

Furthermore, he admitted that some of the attacks were carried on by himself, like the one against the college he attends. He also claimed that he didn’t sell access to Titanium Stresser because of the money, but instead, he did it in order to make a name for himself on the internet.

Ben Cooper, who’s serving as Mudd’s lawyer, claims that he was bullied at school and that’s why he felt the need to withdraw from it. As a consequence, Mudd was ‘lost in an alternate reality’, which made him want to prove himself on the internet by punishing those who wronged him. They’re not saying that he didn’t know what he was doing, but instead that he lacked empathy for his victims, because of the bullying and the school’s failure at coming to his aid.

Even with a defense like this, a 20-year-old Mudd was sentenced to spend two years in a young offender institution. The judge justifies this decision by stating that there’s still a duty to the public, and that people feel threatened, damaged, and worried about Mudd’s actions, and that he needs to be punished for the crimes he committed.