A 23- year old hacker from Utah has been sent to the prison for 27 months for launching DDoS attacks on the servers of the popular gaming service providers like Valve’s Steam, Sony’s PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox, EA, Riot Games, Quake Live, Nintendo, DOTA2 and League of Legend servers between December 2013 and January 2014.
The name of the hacker is Austin Thompson but he is popularly known as DerpTrolling in the online world. He along with his team started a new trend of launching DDoS attacks on gaming service providers during Christmas. And the hackers justified by giving lame reasons like “to spoil everyone’s holiday”, “to make people spend time with their families” or “for the lulz”.
This trend inspired other hacker groups to follow this trend and lunch this type of attacks during the Christmas holidays. The hacker groups include Lizard Squad in 2014, Phantom Squad and R.I.U in 2016. All this lead to many online gaming services to go offline because they were lacking strong DDoS mitigation services at that time.
Seeing all these activities, the FBI came into force and the agency along with the law enforcement from the UK and the Netherlands shut down the domains of 15 DDoS for hire services last year during the month of December to prevent any future DDoS attacks.
Austin Thompson got successfully arrested in 2014 after getting doxed and proved guilty in 2024. The court’s sentencing document also suggests that Thompson has to pay 95,000 dollars to Daybreak Games (formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment) for causing damage to this gaming company. The hacker has to be in prison for 27 months starting from August 27.
