A 23-year-old troll has been sentenced to 27 months and jail and a fine of almost $100,000 for taking down servers at Sony Online Entertainment for years.
When most gamers have a rough time in an online multiplayer game, they engage in the usual assortment compensation tactics, including shouting obscenities at no-one in particular, "griefing", and deliberately killing teammates in an animalistic display of dominance.
However, some people with certain skills beyond gaming will go a step further and take their frustrations out on the company that makes the game itself. These sorts of personal attacks are almost always in the form of a denial-of-service attack, or DOS attacks, which take down game servers by flooding them with an influx of data.
DOS attacks are the digital equivalent of parking your car in front of a storefront door so that nobody can get inside. It gets your point across, but you’re still illegally parked and you’re definitely going to get arrested.
Which is exactly what happened for one 23-year-old hacker named Austin Thompson. He took down Daybreak Studios’ servers--then known as Sony Online Entertainment--in a series of targeted DOS attacks that put various games out of commission for hours at a time. Those servers hosted such games as PlanetSide 2, EverQuest 2, and DC Universe Online, although we don’t know which particular game Thompson was upset about.
Thompson has been ordered to remand himself to start a 27-month prison sentence on August 23rd as well as pay a $95,000 fine to Daybreak Studios. Apparently, Thompson cumulative attacks from December 2013 to January 2014 did enough damage to cost the company at least that amount.
In a statement from the US Department of Justice, the US Attorney’s Office revealed that "Thompson typically used the Twitter account @DerpTrolling to announce that an attack was imminent and then posted ‘scalps’ (screenshots or other photos showing that victims’ servers had been taken down) after the attack."
This also made it pretty easy to track him down. Note to other hackers: don’t get cocky. Hubris will be the downfall of us all.