Many may call the six-year prison sentence too harsh while the operator of eight DDoS-for-hire services got only 13 months.
An Ohio man was sentenced last month to six years in prison for a series of DDoS attacks against websites for the city of Akron, Ohio, and the Akron police department.
The man, 33-year-old James Robinson, was arrested in May 2019 and pleaded guilty to all accusations, most of which were easy to prove, as Robinson had publicly documented all the attacks on the @AkronPhoenix420 Twitter profile while they happened.
The account contains a litany of tweets about DDoS attacks Robinson allegedly carried out. Targets included websites for the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of the Treasury, and NATO. These attacks never caused any mass outages, and two cyber-security firms which provide DDoS mitigation services said they were never aware of his activities until his arrest in 2018.
On Twitter, through the AkronPhoenix420 persona, Robinson always associated with the Anonymous hacker collective, often tagging tweets to suggest they were part of broader attacks -- although no evidence has been found to suggest he collaborated with others for coordinated attacks.
But the most frequent target of Robinson's attacks was the website of his home town, Akron, Ohio -- akronohio.gov -- and most often, the site's section for the local police department.