Hacker Sentenced to 2 Years In Prison

The Justice system in America can be pretty messed up, but sometimes, when we're lucky, sweet, sweet justice is served to people who actually deserve it. Take Adam Mudd for example. He is the hacker that was responsible for attacks against games such as Runescape and Minecraft.

Mudd created and sold a hacking program called the Titanium Stresser when he was 16. He made approximately £386k from selling it to fellow hackers, although he claims his actions weren't motivated by money. His program was found accountable for over 1.7 million hacks including 594 denial of service attacks against 181 IP addresses over the course of two years (2013-2015).

On top of hacking in the gaming industry, he also breached his school's security system, West Herts College, crashing their network and costing them roughly £2000 to investigate. As far as his crowned achievement goes, he cost Runescape a pretty penny. Runescape suffered over 25k attacks from Mudd and his hacking program, costing them over £6 million in order to improve their security against further DDOS attacks. 

Prosecutor Jonathon Polnay concluded that Mudd's hacking program, the Titanium Stresser, is responsible for hacking 666k IP addresses, 53k of which residing in the UK. His program was used by roughly 112k hackers.

The prosecution and the defense came to the agreement that Mudd, who was living with his parents at the time of his arrest (typical) after his expulsion from college, was not at all motivated by money, but was instead looking for status among his internet peers. The defense went on to state that Mudd was "stuck in an alternate reality" due to bullying at school. I'll be the first person to say that bullying is definitely terrible, but justifying attacks on companies over the course of 2 years, costing them millions in the process just because making friends was hard, is definitely not ok.

Hackers are a menace in the video-game community, and most of them do it for absolutely no reason other than the fact that they're bored, or looking for some kind of internet fame. It's about time they got what's coming to them.