20-year-old pleads guilty to DDoS-for-hire scheme that netted $550,000

A 20-year-old Illinois man pleaded guilty to charges related to a scheme to launch millions of distributed denial-of-service attacks against U.S. school districts and other targets, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday. Sergiy Usatyuk and a co-conspirator gained more than $550,000 by charging subscribers for access to booter and stresser services, which typically enable attackers, using only a web browser, to launch a DDoS attack capable of knocking target sites offline. Usatyuk was involved with booter and stresser services including ExoStreeser, QuezStresser, BetaBooter Databooter, Instabooter, Polystress and Zstress. The Exostresser services alone facilitated 1,367,610 DDoS attacks which caused victims to suffer 109,186 hours of downtime, the DOJ said Wednesday. In one case in 2017, a Betabooter user launched a number of DDoS attackers against a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, school district that also affected 17 other organization, including the county government, prosecutors said. Usatyuk was active from around August 2015 to November […]

The post 20-year-old pleads guilty to DDoS-for-hire scheme that netted $550,000 appeared first on CyberScoop.

Continue reading 20-year-old pleads guilty to DDoS-for-hire scheme that netted $550,000