Hacker jailed for bringing down millions of PCs
`A hacker who stopped more than three million Spanish computer users from using the internet has been sentenced to two years in jail. Twenty-six-year-old Santiago Garrido used a computer worm to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks after he was expelled from the popular “Hispano” IRC chat room for disobeying its rules.
The attacks disrupted an estimated three million users of the Wanadoo, ONO, Lleida Net and other internet service providers – amounting to one third of all of Spain’s web users at the time of the 2003 offense. [..]
“Many times hackers use DDoS techniques to try and blackmail the website under attack. On this occasion, it seems the hacker was so furious about being thrown out of a chat room that he resorted to a criminal act to wreak his revenge, affecting millions of internet users in the process,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.’
