Forest Global Training Partners

Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Mirai Co-Author Gets 6 Months Confinement, $8.6M in Fines for Rutgers Attacks

Summary: Paras Jha, the 22-year-old co-author of the Mirai botnet malware, was sentenced in federal court in Trenton to six months of home confinement, 2,500 hours of community service, and $8.6 million in restitution for launching at least four DDoS attacks against Rutgers University while he was a student there. Prosecutors said Jha attacked the school to delay upper-classmen registration for a computer science class and to delay a calculus exam, and later for the publicity the attacks generated; the restitution figure reflects Rutgers' estimate of what it cost the university to respond.

Key Takeaway: Jha and his co-conspirators released the Mirai source code after the September 2016 attack that sidelined KrebsOnSecurity for nearly four days, and that release has since spawned legions of copycat Mirai botnets and variants that persist to this day - meaning the malware outlives the sentence.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Malware
Related