Threat Management, Threat Management

Anonymous member sentenced for role in Koch Industries DDoS attack

A 22-year-old man was sentenced on Wednesday for his part in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a subsidiary of Koch Industries.

According to a release by the U.S. attorney's office in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Christopher Sudlik of St. Louis was sentenced to 36 months of probation, must serve 60 hours of community service, and is ordered to pay $110,932.71 in restitution for his involvement in the incident.

Sudlik previously pled guilty to assisting other members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous in launching a DDoS attack on the servers of Angel Soft bathroom tissue, based in Green Bay, in February and March of 2011.

Utilizing the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) – an open-source network stress tool that can double as a program that sends large chunks of traffic to overwhelm web servers – the Angel Soft servers were flooded with traffic that disrupted its website's service.

According to the release, the attacks that targeted the network servers over three days resulted in “several hundred-thousand dollars” in losses. During his sentencing, Judge William Griesbach reprimanded Sudlik for “crossing the line” and denounced his actions.

In a previous case in December, a Wisconsin was sentenced to two years of probation and fined $183,000 for his part in a similar attack. Eric Rosol pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of accessing a protected computer. According to court documents, his involvement in the attack too about a minute.

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