Anonymous Member Faces 10 Years in Prison
By - Source: Tom's Hardware US
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33 comments
A jury in London convicted a 22-year old member of Anonymous over hacking charges.
The student reportedly participated in numerous hacking attacks that were affected companies including PayPal, MasterCard and Visa following their decision not to process Wikileaks decisions anymore.
Christopher Weatherhead, who considers himself a "hacktivist", and now faces up to 10 years in prison, along with three others who had pleaded guilty to the same charges in January and March.
The group struck their targets with denial-of-service attacks, causing a claimed damage of a total of $5.6 million, according to prosecutors. There was no information when Weatherhead would be sentenced.
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Nearly everyone can jay walk that doesn't mean it should carry a light sentence. Bottom line is if this guy did the exact same thing to you or me and denied us internet connection for X amount of time nothing would be done. Does he deserve to get off scott free?? no, but let the punishment fit the crime
They were stupid. Attacks like that have a signature, lots of similar requests for the same stuff. There's only so many ways to waste bandwidth.
Nearly anyone can rob a bank, that doesn't mean it should carry a light sentence.
Fits like a glove.
Its not you doing the request thought, its 1000 or 100000 innocent users that have no idea the command request their computer just sent. If they focused the attack through themselves in any shape or form they are far below the credit I give the organization
Nearly everyone can jay walk that doesn't mean it should carry a light sentence. Bottom line is if this guy did the exact same thing to you or me and denied us internet connection for X amount of time nothing would be done. Does he deserve to get off scott free?? no, but let the punishment fit the crime
Thinking about the consequences make that 10 year look pretty light.
Go out on the street and protest. Or start a website/group. Either way, the things they are doing is totally unacceptable.
Fair point, but the person who dos an individual attack to you preventing you from paying bills or donating money to a charity that would save a childs life are they any less devastating? My point is simple. Any of us could be hit straight for a month and no one but our ISP would care. The second a possible interrupt commerce comes up the would is up in arms
I doubt it, as far as computers go these are not stupid people. Their attacks were likely completely 3rd party redirects which is very difficult to trace.
great moronic comment
Don't like the system? Work from within it, don't hack it from the outside.
If large entities like wikipedia sponsored hacking to combat the controversial issues like SOPA, as opposed to activism through education and protest like they did, things would have gone much differently. Don't like that paypal etc. wouldn't process wikileaks transactions? Protest the services by not using them, and educate as many people as you can about the situation. If enough people actually care, things will change. If they don't, then maybe you should take another look at your situation.
To those saying that the punishment should fit the crime, examine just how wide-spread a shut-down of financial institutions impacts everyday life. For people whose livelihoods rely on banking or paypal transactions, you can easily destroy an innocent person's livelyhood with just a few days or a week of cutting off access to their financial transaction institutions. For small businesses that don't have giant surpluses of cash, and need to buy supplies with a majority of their daily revolving revenue from transactions, if you cut off those transactions they have no means to buy supplies to support their business. Can't buy supplies, can't support their business, they shut down. Not a small deal.
In today's days, you can't run a firewall and unmanaged switches and have open SQL servers available to the public. This didn't happen because of some kid that can click a fews keys and call himself a hacker. This happened because said business didn't want ot pay the money to protect itself properly, even with the hundreds of millions of dollars left over in profit every year.
They got what they deserved. They could've prevented this problem by paying for the right people to build / maintain their I.T. Security and they would've had someone else to blame.
Instead these companies want to cry that they are victims while in return they are trying to sue the dear, that they hit, for pain and suffering because "it was there"....
So, if I don't hire armed guards to watch my house it's my fault if it gets broken in to, and all my stuff gets stolen?
(So why the hell you bother to write anything at all?) Well im just bored
I'm guessing these 3 weren't. I agree with you on the whole punishment fit the crime thing. In my opinion the three caught were "kids". I doubt anything was redirected I bet they did it right from their own home pc not using a zombie just being naive. I imagine "anonymous" Has a wide variety of talent from the crazy skilled "sony hacks" to the rooks (majority of your ddos attacks). Just because anyone can say they are part of the group. My .02 cents