Ten-Year Hactivist Fugitive "Commander X" Arrested in Mexico
Freeman writes:
A decade after Chris "Commander X" Doyon skipped out on a federal hacking charge and fled the country, the long arm of US law enforcement this week stretched out its hand and plucked him from Mexico City, where he had claimed political asylum. Doyon now faces all of the original charges for coordinating a 2010 High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) DDoS attack on servers belonging to Santa Cruz, California, plus a serious new charge for jumping bail. This has been a surprising turn of events for the homeless hacktivist, who spent his years first in Canada and then in Mexico issuing press releases, hanging out on Twitter, writing a self-published memoir, appearing in documentaries, and meeting up with journalists like me-all without apparent response from the US government.
All that changed on June 11, when Doyon was arrested by Mexican police. This was confirmed by a press release from the US Attorney for the Northern District of California, where Santa Cruz is located, though no details were provided.
(...) The original DDoS incident in Santa Cruz was relatively minor. It was triggered by a new law affecting the homeless community of which Doyon was a part, and it affected Santa Cruz servers for just 30 minutes. The government claimed only a few thousand dollars in damages for investigation and remediation, but the amount was just enough to clear the $5,000 threshold of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, making the DDoS a federal crime.
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