CastleCops Attacker Sentenced to Prison
Via The (Vacaville, California) Reporter.
A Fairfield computer hacker once known as "'Silenz" and "sZ" has been sentenced to two years in prison.
United States Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced Tuesday that Gregory King, 21, of Fairfield, was sentenced to two years in federal prison and was ordered to pay $69,000 in restitution following a guilty plea to two counts of transmitting code to cause damage to a protected computer.
King reportedly admitted to using a "botnet" to conduct distributed-denial-of-service attacks against two different business Web sites - Killanet and Castlecops.
In such an attack, the hacker uses a system of malware-infected, zombie computers to flood victim computers with information and thereby disable them.
King was arrested on Oct. 1, 2007, after FBI agents raided his home and seized a laptop computer containing botnet software and references to King's different Internet monikers.
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here.
Man Pleads Guilty to Attacking CastleCops
Robert McMillan writes on PC World:
A Fairfield, California, hacker has pleaded guilty to launching a Valentine's Day 2007 computer attack that nearly knocked an anti-phishing Web site offline.
Gregory King, 21, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to two counts of "transmitting code to cause damage to a protected computer," for launching distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against the Castlecops anti-phishing Web site and Killanet, an online forum for gamers and graphic designers.
He was arrested on Oct. 1 as part of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Operation Bot Roast. As agents knocked on his door, King stashed his laptop computer in his backyard, but it was eventually recovered, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ).
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Portrait of an Alleged Young Cyber Punk
Dan Goodin writes on The Register:
Late in the evening of February 13, Paul and Robin Laudanski were planning the following day's Valentine's celebration when they received word that CastleCops, the volunteer security website they run, was under assault.
At its peak, the five-day attack flooded CastleCops with close to 1 gigabyte of data every second. The distributed-denial-of-service deluge was so severe that the husband-and-wife team were forced to take their site offline 15 minutes after it started. It also knocked CastleCops' webhost offline for two days, causing more than $160,000 worth of damage to the company and its customers.
"We were planning on having a family Valentine's event," said Paul Laudanski, who along with Robin was forced to spend the next several days migrating to a new hosting provider. "Then, of course, the DDoS started, which ruined those plans."
The attack, according to federal prosecutors, was the handiwork of Greg C. King, a 21-year-old California resident who at one point maintained a 7,000-node botnet. On Monday, he was publicly charged with four counts of illegal hacking, charges that carry a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison and a $1m fine.
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here.
Note: Paul & Robin are friends of mine, and I'm delighted this kid was busted.
- ferg
