Their DDoS malware threatened the entire Internet:
First-year college students are understandably frustrated when they can't get into popular upper-level electives. But they usually just gripe. Paras Jha was an exception. Enraged that upper-class students were given priority to enroll in a computer-science elective at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Paras decided to crash the registration website so that no one could enroll.
On Wednesday night, 19 November 2014, at 10:00 p.m. EST—as the registration period for first-year students in spring courses had just opened—Paras launched his first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. He had assembled an army of some 40,000 bots, primarily in Eastern Europe and China, and unleashed them on the Rutgers central authentication server. The botnet sent thousands of fraudulent requests to authenticate, overloading the server. Paras's classmates could not get through to register.
[...] Paras was furious that Rutgers chose Incapsula, a small cybersecurity firm based in Massachusetts, as its DDoS-mitigation provider. He claimed that Rutgers chose the cheapest company. "Just to show you the poor quality of Incapsula's network, I have gone ahead and decimated the Rutgers network (and parts of Incapsula), in the hopes that you will pick another provider that knows what they are doing."
Paras's fourth attack on the Rutgers network, taking place during finals, caused chaos and panic on campus. Paras reveled in his ability to shut down a major state university, but his ultimate objective was to force it to abandon Incapsula. Paras had started his own DDoS-mitigation service, ProTraf Solutions, and wanted Rutgers to pick ProTraf over Incapsula. And he wasn't going to stop attacking his school until it switched.
The article is an interesting and lengthy read about the rise and fall of the Mirai botnet and is well worth the time to read.
(Score: 1) by namefags_are_jerks on Monday May 29 2023, @04:58AM (3 children)
It makes me strangely happy that the old traditions of the mid-1980s WarGames-inspired Teenage Crackers have not left us...
I hope that Paras find his own Ally Sheedy lookalike gf some day.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Monday May 29 2023, @02:37PM (2 children)
He's an ass. He threw a temper tantrum because priority was given to people that were nearing the end of their degree and needing electives to finish it. These students themselves were previously lower priority.
(Score: 1) by namefags_are_jerks on Monday May 29 2023, @07:33PM (1 child)
What part of "teenager" didn't you get...
(Score: 3, Touché) by aafcac on Monday May 29 2023, @07:41PM
I don't recall ever having thrown a temper tantrum of this magnitude. And I'm pretty sure neither have any of my friends.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Monday May 29 2023, @09:29PM (1 child)
I didn't read the article, but I'm willing to bet it ended poorly for him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2023, @01:16AM
Actually, no.