Man Indicted For Web Attack Against Sites

Federal prosecutors have found a man guilty of conducting a series of botnet attacks, which include attacks that hit the sites of conventional talking heads like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Rudolph Giuliani.

As per court documents, Mitchell Frost, 22, started distributed denial of service attacks from a 'botnet' network of hijacked systems he controlled from March 7 to March 12, 2010.

Frost was studying in the first year of the University of Akron when he launched the attacks and reportedly used is school's network to control the botnet, which was created during August 2006-March 2007.

The prosecutors stated that the attacks on anncoulter.com, billoreilly.com and joinrudy2008.com made each of the sites inaccessible, at least for a shorter period of time, and called for involvement and repair by the owners of the websites. As a result, they have to suffer huge losses which exceeded almost $5,000, as per the news published by The Register on May 19, 2010.

Frost initiated around five different attacks against billoreilly.com, which eventually resulted in taking the site offline in order to deal with the problem.

Further, University of Akron was another supposed victim, which closed its computer network for almost eight-and-a-half hours on March 14, 2007.

It was also known that the attack seemed to be a fault and the proposed target was an unfamiliar gaming server that was hosted on the university network. For repairing the problem, the university spent around US$10,000.

The court filings inform that on March 28, 2010, around three weeks after the attacks, the Federal agents searched the Frost's dorm room and discovered almost 3,000 unlawfully acquired usernames and passwords.

Frost was accused with one count each of purposely damaging a protected system and illegally obtaining 15 or more inauthentic access devices. In addition, he was also found guilty of stealing data which includes usernames, passwords and credit card numbers from hacked systems.

Carlos Warner, Frost's public defender, stated in an e-mail interview on May 18, 2010 that though Fred has not pled guilty yet, he is very regretful for his actions, as per the news published by PCWorld on May 19, 2010.

Related article: Man Sues and Wins against ISP for Spamming Mail

» SPAMfighter News - 5/28/2010