20-year-old English man, Adam Mudd, who had spent the last few years writing software that performed distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, has been sentenced to two years imprisonment following his trial. Originally arrested in early 2016 at his parents' house, he eventually pled guilty to violating Britain's Computer Misuse Act in November last year.
Mudd built a piece of software called Titanium Stresser when he was just 16 years old. Marketed as a legal stress test for online services, Mudd sold the tool to several thousand users, who between them conducted some 1.7 million DDOS attacks against services like Microsoft's Xbox Live, Minecraft's servers, Runescape servers and the backbone of several other games and online platforms.
Mudd himself also utilised the tool for his own DDOS hacks. Purportedly he sent out 595 attacks against a variety of targets, including his own college, between 2013 and 2015.
Over the years Mudd made upwards of £300,000 ($384,000) from selling the software at varied price points depending on the functionality that customers required. For those looking for only limited attack potential, £2 was enough to buy the Titanium Stresser. Those who wanted its full potential though, needed to pay as much as £250.
The damage done by Mudd's software's various attacks has been rated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Image source: Softpedia