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UK Arrest Over Xbox Live and Playstation Network Outages
An anonymous reader writes Neowin.net is reporting the arrest of one Vincent Omari, a UK citizen [see also this Daily Mail story from a few days ago mentioning Omari], in the Christmas Day DDoS attacks on Sony's PSN and Microsoft's XBL systems: "In documents sent to Neowin, Vinnie Omari has been accused of 'hacking of the Playstation Network and Xbox Live systems over the Christmas Period'... While this is the first arrest related to the recent service disruptions, it may not be the last... In further conversations with those who are familiar with the investigation and the arrest, Omari believes that the police will not find anything of substance on his computers. His alleged crime is that he helped coordinate the DDOS attack on the service."
They committed fraud on Paypal, they carried out a bomb scare on a flight a Sony exec was on and they committed offences under the Computer Misuse Act.
Get your head out of your arse and try acting like a grownup if that's at all possible.
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To be fair, I'd label a DDOS attack as vandalism + opportunity cost loss, and only criminal if someone's safety is / was at risk.
Owning or controlling a botnet should be more serious than spamming game servers. Trespassing and theft.
Generally, misusing your own computer system is not a criminal offense unless you really go to extremes.
Yes, but they weren't, were they - they were misusing millions of 3rd party's computers to create a DDoS
They were misusing the network (yes, that's a computer system)
They were misusing Sony's computer (by feeding it bogus data until it became unresponsive).