"Downthem" DDoS-for-Hire Boss Gets 2 Years in Prison:
A 33-year-old Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison today following his conviction last year for operating services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hundreds of thousands of Internet users and websites.
Matthew Gatrel of St. Charles, Ill. was found guilty for violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) related to his operation of downthem[.]org and ampnode[.]com, two DDoS-for-hire services that had thousands of customers who paid to launch more than 200,000 attacks.
Despite admitting to FBI agents that he ran these so-called "booter" services (and turning over plenty of incriminating evidence in the process), Gatrel opted to take his case to trial, defended the entire time by public defenders. Gatrel's co-defendant and partner in the business, Juan "Severon" Martinez of Pasadena, Calif., pleaded guilty just before the trial.
[...] Prosecutors said Downthem sold subscriptions allowing customers to launch DDoS attacks, while AmpNode provided "bulletproof" server hosting to customers — with an emphasis on "spoofing" servers that could be pre-configured with DDoS attack scripts and lists of vulnerable "attack amplifiers" used to launch simultaneous cyberattacks on victims.
[...] The government charged that Gatrel and Martinez constantly scanned the Internet for these misconfigured devices, and then sold lists of Internet addresses tied to these devices to other booter service operators.
"Gatrel ran a criminal enterprise designed around launching hundreds of thousands of cyber-attacks on behalf of hundreds of customers," prosecutors wrote in a memorandum submitted in advance of his sentencing. "He also provided infrastructure and resources for other cybercriminals to run their own businesses launching these same kinds of attacks. These attacks victimized wide swaths of American society and compromised computers around the world."
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15 2022, @05:21PM (2 children)
I don't understand how one decides to start up a business that is designed to screw people over as its sole purpose. I know you can make arguments for various things like banks or Microsoft or whatever where people get screwed over, but that isn't the primary business objective like this. How does one look themselves in the mirror or what do they tell their mothers what they do for a living?
(Score: 2) by crm114 on Wednesday June 15 2022, @05:49PM
I think the term is "psychopath"
Here's a link... there are many others. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-psychopath-5025217 [verywellmind.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15 2022, @09:28PM
...money.
Econonically feasible for said person.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Adam on Wednesday June 15 2022, @06:35PM
We are way too soft on white collar crime. Americans only value their own lives at about $10m. The harms of running a "criminal enterprise" are surely higher than that.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 16 2022, @06:31AM
Did they catch the insidious aristarchus, with his constant submissions to SoylentNews, designed quite specifically to drive janrinok insane? That coujnts as a DDOs, right? And besides, I found the font et origino in the logs of the IRC:
So not all Soylentil Nazi sympathizers are Nazis, but those that do, are.