Denial of Service Attack Nets 2-Year Prison Sentence

Madrid, February 9, 2006 - According to several publications in Spain, the author of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) that affected over three million Internet users has been sentenced to two years in prison and also faces a fine of 1.4 million euros.

This was the sentence received by a twenty-six year old Spanish man who, after being expelled from the "Hispano" IRC chatroom for disobeying rules, created a worm aimed at collapsing that network through distributed denial-of-service attacks.

The attacks spread for several months, affecting Internet service providers like Wanadoo, ONO or Lleida Net, as well as IRC-Hispano.

Several spokespeople have highlighted that this one of the first sentences related to this type of criminal activity in Europe and the most significant crime of this type committed in Spain, affecting 33 percent of Internet users.