Hackers chase likes, just like us
When he was 16 years old, Adam Mudd, a computer science student from Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, created a piece of software that could be used to take down even the largest, most fortified websites in the world. Mudd dubbed his tool Titanium Stresser, a name that captured both its strength and its capacity to cause niggling mischief. The software was a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tool, a kind of digital weapon used to direct vast amounts of fake traffic to a particular website in order to cause its servers to fail and go offline - a bit like flicking every light switch in a skyscraper on at the same exact moment in order to trigger a power cut.
Between December 2013 and March 2015, Mudd, who lived with his parents at the time, carried out 594 such attacks on more than 180 targets, crashing, for example, the network at his school, West Herts College. Mudd, who pleaded guilty to the charges at the Old Bailey last month, soon began selling his software online. It proved popular and profitable; more than 112,000 people bought packages from Mudd, who made 386,000 from his enterprise. Titanium Stresser soon became a notorious scourge of online institutions around the world, particularly video game companies. The fantasy game RuneScape, for example, suffered more than 25,000 attacks. Its owner company reportedly spent 6m trying to defend itself against the onslaught.
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