Hacker sentenced for DDoS attack on gambling site
A British teenager has been given a 12 month sentence for a cyber attack on an unnamed gambling site.
Max Whitehouse, 19, of Nottinghamshire, was sentenced on Friday to a year long term for a cyber-attack on an unnamed online gambling website.
However, Nottingham Crown Court judge Michael Stokes, suspended the sentence believing jail time to be counterproductive and highly damaging to a teen who was young and naive.
The site, which lost around £18,000, claims to have been flooded with traffic, known as a dedicated denial of service (DDoS), causing it to crash and freezing its ability to transact with customers.
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Two years previously, the brazen teenager, then 17, had even bragged about his plan through his mother's Twitter account, although police were dismissive of the severity of the threat at the time.
When making the arrest, Nottinghamshire police discovered a cache of illegal imported Chinese counterfeit weapons, including knuckledusters, tear gas canisters and a stun gun.
Judge Stokes was however satisfied that the teen had had no intention of distributing any of the weapons and that the attack on the site in question was undertaken merely to prove it could be done. While sentencing, Stokes said;
“At the time you were extremely naïve, and you just wanted to see if you could actually do it. You were living a life through a screen, rather than outside. Get our more and live. You should take up a sport like rugby or something.”
Whitehouse pled guilty and wept while his sentence was passed down which also included an order to pay £200 towards the cost of his own prosecution.
