Former Student Gets 30 Months For Political DDoS Attacks

wiredmikey writes "A former University of Akron student was sentenced Friday to 30 months in prison, followed by 3 years of supervised release for conducting denial of service attacks on the sites of several prominent conservative figures as well as infecting several systems with botnet software. Mitchell L. Frost, age 23, of Bellevue, Ohio admitted that between August 2006 and March 2007, he initiated denial of service attacks on web servers hosting the sites of political commentators, including Bill O'Reilly, Rudy Giuliani, Ann Coulter, and others."

Comments

Re:As a rabid lefty

[buravirgil]

Wasn't Ohio the front line at the time? Diebold? Sequoia? Non-auditing black boxes?
I see fighting fire with fire a whole world gone blind scenario, no pun intended, but I can't 'judge' DDoS attacks as good or bad.
Color me unsurprised good-old-boy networks contracting out the voting process county by county across the nation have their profits poorly scrutinized while this villain is symbolically sentenced.

Re:Scratch a Liberal, find an Autocrat.

[rtb61]

The reality though is that a DDos attack on a political website is largely a ho hum because it doesn't ever last that long, those sites were affected for hours not months, so impermanent acts of graffiti not even really vandalism as the damage is only temporary.

Of course "caused the entire University of Akron computer network to be knocked off-line for approximately 8 12 hours" attacks on commercial sites is a different matter all together as it can involve major loss of income and productivity. Then there is "using the compromised machines to spread malware and harvest data from the compromised systems, including user names, passwords, credit card numbers, and CVV security codes".

It appears the headline in this case is more than just a little wildly misleading and the DDos attacks on the political sites had very little to do with the harsh sentencing. Now as Fox not-News actively censors the news and in fact sued for the right to actively and intentional lie in the news as it is entertainment only, can you really censor a censor, or are you practising freedom of speech by censoring an avowed censor of the truth.