Anonymous Hacker Gets Six Years In Prison For DDoS Attacks

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: 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 profile while they happened. The account contains a litany of tweets about DDoS attacks 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. On Twitter, through the AkronPhoenix420 persona, Robinson always associated with the Anonymous hacker collective, often tagging tweets to suggest they were part of broader attacks — although no evidence has been found to suggest he collaborated with others for coordinated attacks. […] In court documents, the FBI said that some of Robinson’s DDoS attacks against Akron’s official website were successful, and most notably a series of attacks he carried out in early August 2017 that caused prolonged downtime. […] Following his guilty plea, Robinson was sentenced to six years in prison on October 3, last month. He was also ordered to pay $668,684 in restitution to Akron officials.