Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

California Man Gets 26-Month Prison Sentence for DDoS Attacks

The U.S. Department of Justice announced this week that a 44-year-old man from California has been sentenced to 26 months in prison for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on two popular astronomy websites.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced this week that a 44-year-old man from California has been sentenced to 26 months in prison for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on two popular astronomy websites.

David Chesley Goodyear of El Segundo, California, was charged in August 2017 and was found guilty by a jury in February 2018. He was accused of launching cyberattacks on the website of Astronomics, a family-owned telescope retailer in Oklahoma, and Cloudy Nights, the world’s largest free astronomy forum, which Astronomics operates.

Goodyear has been sentenced to 26 months in prison and three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay over $27,000 to Astronomics, which represents the money spent by the company on mitigating the DDoS attacks and lost profits. The court also fined him $2,500.

“Judge Heaton explained the punishment by pointing out Goodyear’s clear intent to harm Astronomics and the importance of deterring sophisticated cybercrimes, which are difficult to trace and therefore particularly important to punish and thereby send the appropriate message to others,” the Justice Department said in a press release.

According to authorities, Goodyear created several accounts on the Cloudy Nights forum, but they were all banned for terms of service violations that included sending threats to administrators, moderators and other users.

In August 2016, after another one of his accounts was banned, Goodyear decided to launch a DDoS attack on the Astronomics website and the Cloudy Nights forum. The attacks started on August 13 and continued intermittently until the end of August, when law enforcement interviewed the man.

It appears that Goodyear had not attempted to hide his real IP address and since he openly threatened to launch attacks on the site after being banned, it was not difficult for law enforcement to identify him. He admitted being behind the attacks when interviewed.

The 26-month prison sentence is fairly standard for a DDoS attack. Some notable exceptions are the case of John Kelsey Gammell, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison – his sentence also included firearm charges – and the case of Mirai author Paras Jha, who got house arrest after collaborating with the FBI.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Another case that made headlines is the one of Austin Thompson, who will be sentenced in March 2019 for launching DDoS attacks on several online gaming companies, including Sony Online Entertainment. He pleaded guilty in November.

Related: Operator of Counter AV Service Sentenced to 14 Years in Prison

Related: DDoS Attacks Less Frequent But Pack More Punch

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.