A 23-year-old hacker from Utah, United States, has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for carrying out DDoS attacks on major companies and services involved in gaming, such as Sony, Valve's Steve, Microsoft Xbox, EA, Nintendo, Quake Reside, DOTA2 and League of Legends servers.
The defendant is named Austin Thompson, although he is known online as DerpTrolling. He is a hacker who has distinguished himself from others because he specializes in DDoS attacks on the above companies and many others.
The hacker began the attacks in 2013. At that time, companies were not yet using strong protection programs against DDoS attacks.
Thompson has been active since 2011. However, his most successful attacks occurred between December 2013 and January 2014. During that period, he carried out the most attacks.
Many online gaming services and products stopped working, at least for a certain period of time, due to the hacker's attacks. Seeing Thompson's success, many hackers followed his example in the following years.
Various hacking groups, such as the Lizard Squad, began carrying out DDoS attacks around Christmas 2014. Another group, known as the Phantom Squad, did the same in 2015 and the RIU Celebrity Patrol in 2016.
The FBI noticed that DDoS attacks on gaming services were occurring around the same time each year (Christmas) . So, the organization, along with authorities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, shut down about 15 DDoS-for-hire services and products in December in an effort to reduce the number of attacks. From what it seems, this move has worked.
Thompson was arrested in the summer of 2018.
According to the court's decision, the hacker will have to pay $95,000 to restore the games, while his prison will begin on August 27.
"DDoS attacks cause companies and people millions of dollars in damage every year, which is why there is a great effort to catch hackers," said US Attorney Robert Brewer.
