A Romanian cybercriminal has been sentenced to one year in US federal prison for conducting DDoS attacks on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft‘s European servers back in 2010.
The 38-year-old Calin Mateias from Bucharest pleaded guilty in February this year to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer.
Since pleading guilty, Mateias has paid $30,000 in restitution to Blizzard Entertainment. He was sentenced by United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II.
According to the US Department of Justice, Mateias conducted DDoS attacks between February and September 2010 over a dispute with other World of Warcraft’s player. His attacks not only disrupted the company’s gaming servers but also blocked others from playing the game.
“Mateias, using his in-game avatar, often participated in collaborative events, such as “raids,” where players joined forces to meet game objectives and were rewarded with virtual proceeds or in-game advantages. Mateias became involved in disputes with other players for a variety of reasons, including the division of loot and membership in raid teams,” noted the DoJ.
Mateias was extradited from Romania to the United States on November 20th, 2017 after his indictment in 2011. This, however, is not the first time when Mateias has faced a federal charge.
In fact, in 2004 he (along with five others) was indicted for international conspiracy to steal more than $10 million from the world’s largest technology distributor Ingram Micro. However, those charges were dropped by the authorities.
Meanwhile a couple of weeks ago, in a joint operation, authorities from around the world not only shut down the world’s largest DDoS-for-hire service Webstresser.org but also seized its domain and arrested several of its administrators and top users.
Webstresser was used by cybercriminals around the world to target large and small scale businesses including banks, government institutions, Police and gaming giants.
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