A 21-year-old man has been sentenced to serve 13 months in federal prison for his role in creating the Satori DDoS botnet, which descended from Mirai IoT malware, announced U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder in Anchorage, Alaska.
Kenneth Currin Schuchman, 22, of Vancouver, Wash., was sentenced today by Chief U.S. District Judge Timothy M. Burgess, after previously pleading guilty to one count of fraud and related activity in connection with computers, in violation of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act.
As part of his sentence, Schuchman was also ordered to serve a term of 18 months of community confinement, following his release from prison and a three-year term of supervised release.
The investigation revealed that Schuchman had been engaging in criminal botnet activity since at least August 2017, ultimately compromising hundreds of thousands of devices worldwide, including devices in the District of Alaska.
According to the prosecution, Schuchman continued to engage in criminal botnet activity, and violated several other conditions of his pretrial release, following his arrest in August 2018.
The three defendants responsible for creating the Mirai botnet, the computer attack platform that inspired the successor botnets, were previously sentenced in September 2018.
According to court documents, the botnets were initially based largely on the source code previously developed by other individuals to create the Mirai botnet.
However, Schuchman and his criminal associates “Vamp” and “Drake” added additional features over time, so that the botnets grew more complex and effective.
At various times, these successor botnets were known as “Satori,” “Okiru,” “Masuta,” and “Tsunami”/“Fbot.” While Schuchman and his criminal associates utilized these successor botnets to conduct DDoS attacks themselves, Schroder stated the hackers’ primary focus was selling access to paying customers in order to generate illicit proceeds.
