The wheels of justice flip gradual, however they crush with horrible drive. One of the hackers behind denial-of-service assaults on Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak), Blizzard and Riot Games in late 2013/early 2014 has been sentenced to 2 years in jail and $95,000 in damages paid to Daybreak. As reported by Polygon, Austin Thompson was a part of hacking group “DerpTrolling”, who amused themselves by kicking over game servers and bragging about it on Twitter. The sentencing decide didn’t discover it so humorous, accepting a responsible plea for “Damage to a protected computer”.
The sentencing announcement (vieweable here) notes that the utmost penalty may have been as excessive as ten years in jail and a $250,000 high quality. Thompson seems to have been a straightforward goal on this case, operating DerpTrolling’s public social media account, asserting prematurely that an assault was deliberate, after which posting footage confirming the injury finished. Public idiocy, for positive.
As Polygon level out, this isn’t the primary time a jail sentence has been handed out for a DDoS assault. Still, it’s on the harsher finish of issues, and akin to a two year sentence handed out in the UK for creating tools used to perpetrate such attacks. My take is that the high quality would have most likely been loads to dissuade repeat offences. While it was undeniably an assault on a company laptop community, the tip end result was little greater than irritation for finish customers and a monetary hit for the corporate.
Still, if this sentence doesn’t dissuade others from attempting (or a minimum of from doing it so publicly), nothing will. Given that Square Enix just recently announced that their new Final Fantasy XIV enlargement launch was accompanied by a DDoS assault, I’d be shocked if this sentence modified a lot exterior of Thompson’s life.
