A Georgia man has admitted in court to employing a third-party to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The man, Tucker Preston, 22, of Macon, Georgia, was charged with one count of damaging protected computers by transmission of a program, code or command.
Preston is the co-founder of BackConnect Security LLC, a company that provides protection against large-scale DDoS attacks.
He pled guilty to engaging with a DDoS-for-hire service to target a company that maintained servers in New Jersey, the United States Department of Justice announced.
During a DDoS attack, a large volume of web traffic is directed toward a victim’s resources, such as a server or another computer system, to either slow it down or completely take it offline.
According to court documents, in or around December 2015, Preston asked the DDoS-for-hire service to initiate attacks against the victim company, which disrupted the company’s business and caused damage.
Preston pled guilty to one count punishable by a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He is scheduled for sentencing on May 7, 2020.
While the victim company isn’t named in court documents, security journalist Brian Krebs suggests that it could be the Free Software Foundation.
The non-profit apparently considered working with BackConnect, but started experiencing DDoS attacks after informing the company that it would contract a different entity for DDoS protection.
Related: How to Stop a DDoS Attack Without Sabotaging Your Own Network
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