DDoS a Rock Star, Face Jail Time – FBI Agents Arrest GeneSimmons.Com Attacker

FBI agents arrested a Connecticut man on Tuesday morning, who is being charged with conducting a denial of service attack against GeneSimmons.com, the official website for the rockstar leader of the band KISS.

According to the U.S Attorney’s office, Kevin George Poe, a 24 year-old man from Manchester, Connecticut, was arrested and taken into custody without incident at the federal courthouse in Hartford. Poe, who used the online handle “spydr101,” made his first appearance Tuesday morning in a U.S. District Court, where a judge released him a $10,000 bond and ordered him to appear in federal court in Los Angeles on a date that has yet to be set.

An indictment returned last week accused Poe of being affiliated with the Anonymous hacking group, and specifically charges him with two counts—conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer.

In October 2010, Poe and others linked to the Anonymous hacking collective, allegedly conducted a five-day long distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the server hosting Simmons’ website. According to the indictment, Poe made use of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC,) a favorite tool used by the group to conduct DDoS attacks by sending a flood of TCP/UDP packets over a network in an attempt to overwhelm a system and make it inaccessible.

Poe faces a statutory maximum penalty of 15 years in federal prison, if convicted of the two counts in the indictment.

Related Stories:

• Man Pleads Guilty to Hacking Neighbor’s Wireless, Sending Threats against Vice President

• Former Goldman Sachs Programmer Found Guilty After Stealing Computer Code

• Chinese National Pleads Guilty to Stealing Ford Trade Secrets

• Akamai Employee Arrested, Accused of Trying to Sell Information to Foreign Government