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The Romanian player received a prison sentence for the DDoS attacks
A Romanian World of Warcraft player was charged with one year in federal prison after launching distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) on the game’s servers. Eight years after the incident, the trial finally ended with the player’s charges, apart from a serious fine for the same attacks.
The Romanian player had launched a DDoS attack on the WoW servers
Calin Mateias, now aged 38, faced trial for the DDoS attacks after he was extradited from his home country. According to the investigations, the man launched attacks on the WoW servers in 2010, between February and September. It turns out he had a conflict with his team based on loot splitting and hierarchy matters, so he decided to launch the attacks as some sort of vengeance.
Mateias was extradited soon after the incident, as he received the accusations in 2011. However, until November 2017, he has only been in custody. Only now did he receive the federal prison charge. The court found him guilty of launching DDoS attacks on a network of protected computers.
Soon after his intervention in the game, plenty of European WoW servers went down. This prevented many people from playing the game, so it counts as serious damage. Given the unpleasant situation it caused, the court also had the man pay a $29,987 fine to Blizzard Entertainment.
The man had a history of cyberattacks
This wasn’t the first time when Mateias engaged in cyberattacks. In 2004, he also received an accusation of trying to steal over $10 million from the tech company Ingram Micro. He was part of an organized group that attacked the company’s ordering system. After placing fake orders, he and his group could overcome the company’s security filters and order products to Romania.
At a certain point, the company figured everything out and blocked all the orders placed by Mateias. However, he didn’t stop. He managed to find some people in the US he recruited to receive the orders the company had previously blocked.
Image source: Flickr
