Booter Owner Pleads Guilty in Federal Court
Illinois man offered "DDoS for hire" services that hit millions of victims.
Sergiy P. Usatyuk, who owned a series of services that collectively launched millions of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, has pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of conspiracy to cause damage to Internet-connected computers. The services he owned and offered for use included ExoStress.in ("ExoStresser"), QuezStresser.com, Betabooter.com ("Betabooter"), Databooter.com, Instabooter.com, Polystress.com, and Zstress.net.
The sites were booter services, a class of publicly available, Web-based services that allow cybercriminals to launch DDoS attacks, often for low fees paid by customers who sign up via Web browser and online payment.
According to court documents, Usatyuk ran the network between August 2015 and November 2017. In September 2017, the ExoStresser website advertised that " ... its booter service alone had launched 1,367,610 DDoS attacks, and caused targeted victim computer systems to suffer 109,186.4 hours of network downtime," one of the documents shows.
No date for sentencing was announced.
Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop 2019. Learn from the industry's most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop agenda here.
About the Author
You May Also Like
DevSecOps/AWS
Oct 17, 2024Social Engineering: New Tricks, New Threats, New Defenses
Oct 23, 202410 Emerging Vulnerabilities Every Enterprise Should Know
Oct 30, 2024Simplify Data Security with Automation
Oct 31, 2024Unleashing AI to Assess Cyber Security Risk
Nov 12, 2024