A 38-year-old Romanian man was extradited on federal charges of launching a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) on the servers of World of Warcraft in 2010. He was sentenced to one year in federal prison for the attacks.
The player also faced a steep fine for the DDoS attacks.
Raid Problems
Calin Mateias was extradited from Romania to face trial for the attacks on the World of Warcraft servers. According to the US Department of Justice says that Mateias used DDoS attacks on the servers between February and September 2010. Mateias launched the attack after having disagreements with his raid team about the division of loot and membership.
Mateias has previously been indicted in 2011 but has been in custody since November 2017 after extradition. He pleads guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer in February. He was also ordered to pay World of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment $29,987 for the costs it took to fight against the DDoS attacks.
After the attacks were carried out on the World of Warcraft servers in Europe, thousands of players were not able to play the game.
Former Attacks
Mateias was previously indicted for the attempted theft of more than $10 million from Ingram Micro in 2004. He was part of a fraud ring that targeted Ingram Micro's online ordering system and placed fraudulent orders for computers and computer equipment. Mateias was 24-years-old at the time.
During the time of the attack, Mateias was using the online nickname of Dr. Mengele. He started to hack into Ingram Micro's online ordering system in 1999. Then he used that information to bypass Ingram Micro's online security safeguards and order computer equipment to Romania. When his orders were blocked by the company he recruited others to receive the computer equipment for him in the United States.
DDoS Crackdown
A website used to perform DDoS attacks was shut down by law enforcement in April. Webstresser.org was the world's largest marketplace for DDoS attacks. Its servers were seized by law enforcement, this included information on more than 136,000 users that used the website to launch at least 4 million attacks.
In a statement, Europol warns people that DDoS attacks are legal. This website was out in the open selling DDoS attacks that can be crippling. Europol says that people who carry out DDoS attacks will be subject to a fine, prison sentence, or both. DDoS attacks are used to disrupt the servers of rivals businesses or for revenge.
