Teen behind Xbox Live and PSN DoS attacks sentenced to two years in prison

It looks like the person behind the infamous Microsoft and Sony DDOS attack back in 2014 has been sentenced to two years in prison. The teen was 16 years old when he began selling access to his network of breached IP addresses, earning around £386,000 in the process. The ‘Titanium Stresser' program was used in more than one million attacks between December 2013 and March 2015.

The Titanium Stresser program was used to carry out huge attacks on Microsoft, Sony, TeamSpeak, Minecraft servers and more. Around 666,000 IP addresses were used to carry out these denial of service attacks, 53,000 of which were based in the UK according to the prosecutor, Jonathan Polnay.

Aside from costing Microsoft and Sony a lot of money, this guy is also said to have cost the developers behind Runescape as much as £6m after the game suffered massive attacks. That money went towards beefier servers and DDOS protection.

According to a report on The Guardian, the defence argued that the teen merely sought friendship and status in the gaming community by setting up these huge attacks. However, the prosecution successfully argued that this was actually just a serious money making operation, as evidenced by the £386K generated by selling access to these DDOS tools.

As a result, the judge ultimately opted for a two year prison sentence.

KitGuru Says: As evidenced by the Runescape numbers, these DoS attacks can cost companies huge amounts of money to protect against. If it cost Runescape £6m, then I wonder how much the 2014 Christmas Day attack ended up costing Sony and Microsoft.

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