British hacker behind attacks on Sony and Microsoft jailed for two years

That's a hell of a way to make a name for yourself, if you know your computers. Adam Mudd, a young hacker responsible for millions of DDOS attacks worldwide has been sentenced to two years in prison.

Two years in prison – that’s the cost of creating a hacking business worth close to GBP 400,000 for a young British man Adam Mudd. When he was 16 (now 20), he created a program called Titanium Stresser, which has been responsible for over 1.7 million attacks worldwide. Some of them were targeted at websites and servers belonging to Microsoft, such as Minecraft and Xbox Live. Other victims of Titanium Stresser were chat tool for players TeamSpeak as well as MMORPG Runescape, whose owners faced a revenue loss of GBP 184,000 and were forced to spend GBP 6 million to increase its security.

Mudd himself carried out 594 DDOS attacks against 181 IP addresses between December 2013 and March 2015, including security breaches against his college, The Guardian reports. He also earned more than GBP 386,000 from selling the program to hackers around the world. Mudd pleaded guilty before the court and has been jailed for two years. Interestingly, Jonathan Polnay, prosecuting, said:

This is a young man who lived at home. This is not a lavish lifestyle case. The motivation around this we tend to agree is about status. The money-making is by the by.

Mudd’s defendant aked for the man to be given a suspended sentence on the basis of Mudd having Asperger syndrome and his social problems, which caused his lack of empathy. However, judge Michael Topolski refused to yield. He told Mudd:

I’m entirely satisfied that you knew full well and understood completely this was not a game for fun. It was a serious money-making business and your software was doing exactly what you created it to do.