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19/11/17/1956257 story

DDoS-for-Hire Services Owner Sentenced to 13 Months in Prison

posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 18 2019, @08:45AM   
from the booter-gets-booted-from-society dept.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

DDoS-for-Hire Services Owner Sentenced to 13 Months in Prison

Sergiy P. Usatyuk, the owner and admin of several DDoS-for-hire services also known as booters or stressers, was sentenced to 13 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release.

Booters are web-based platforms designed to allow cybercriminals for a small fee or subscription to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) against a target of their choice, leading to the victim's servers being "booted" from the Internet.

These type of attack tools are usually very cheap and allow anyone to hit online services, websites, or servers with a large scale DDoS attack, and have become increasingly popular during the last five years.

He was sentenced on one count of conspiracy to cause damage to internet-connected computers for launching millions of DDoS attacks against victims from the U.S. and all over the world with the help of booter services he owned, administered, or supported.

Usatyuk was also ordered by Chief U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle to forfeit dozens of servers, computer equipment, as well as $542,925 in proceeds from his illegal scheme.

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Original Submission

• Old story Old story (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday November 18 2019, @10:18AM (2 children)

  by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Monday November 18 2019, @10:18AM (#921466) Journal

  https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/sergiy-usatyuk/ [krebsonsecurity.com]

  A child. Do I believe he was an owner? No. Occam's razor in my mind tells me he was just a white horse, a frontman for some deeper hidden Ukraininan criminal gang.

  --
  Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.

  • Re:Old story (Score: 4, Interesting) by EvilSS on Monday November 18 2019, @03:37PM

    by EvilSS (1456) on Monday November 18 2019, @03:37PM (#921533)

    Not at all out of the realm of possibility. However, a big customer of these services are gamers. Players of multiplayer online games (especially games that use P2P and not centralized servers for game instances so it can be easy to get opponent IPs) use them to knock opponents offline, giving them a win in a match. Or they target streamers (Twitch for example), knocking them not only out of the game but also taking their streams down (same method, get in a match against them on a P2P game, get their IP, and launch a DDoS against them). I think it's one of the reasons these "services" don't get law enforcement attention until they do something more far reaching outside of the gaming community. The mechanics of these attacks are out there on the web, and setting up a service isn't that difficult unfortunately. An enterprising teen with some skills could easily setup one of these sites.

    Parent

  • Re:Old story (Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Tuesday November 19 2019, @07:28AM

    by fraxinus-tree (5590) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @07:28AM (#921864)

    Occam's razor is a valuable tool, no doubt. But it makes a great deal of difference if you know more. For example, being grown and used to living in a profoundly fsck'ed society like Ukrainian one. Owner of the whole DDOS infrastructure at 20?? Probably no, but not for sure. Owner of the wholesale business between the buyers with their CCs and the attackers lurking in the darknet and expecting bitcoins? You are welcome.

    Parent

• wrong sentence (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday November 18 2019, @10:45PM

  by Bot (3902) on Monday November 18 2019, @10:45PM (#921723) Journal

  A better punishment is home detention, forever. Of course, the doorbell the telephone and all the lights in the house should all have a public facing IP address, known to all his victims.

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  Account abandoned.