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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

Is 6 years in prison excessive for launching DDoS attacks against Websites that caused only intermittent downtime [zdnet.com]?

An Ohio man was sentenced last month to six years in prison for a series of DDoS attacks against websites for the city of Akron, Ohio, and the Akron police department.

The man, 33-year-old James Robinson, was arrested in May 2019 and pleaded guilty to all accusations, most of which were easy to prove, as Robinson had publicly documented all the attacks on the @AkronPhoenix420 [twitter.com] Twitter profile while they happened.

The account contains a litany of tweets about DDoS attacks [twitter.com] Robinson allegedly carried out. Targets included websites for the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of the Treasury, and NATO. These attacks never caused any mass outages, and two cyber-security firms which provide DDoS mitigation services said they were never aware of his activities until his arrest in 2018.

[...]

In interrogations following his arrest, Robinson told investigators he had grudges against the city's police force.

[...]

Ironically, the operator of eight DDoS booter services [zdnet.com] that allowed people like Robinson to rent the firepower to carry out these types of attacks only got a 13-month prison sentence [justice.gov].

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