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Stack Overflow goes down for an hour on Sunday due to DDoS attack

Stack Overflow went out for about an hour on Sunday morning due to a DDoS attack, TechCrunch reported. Stack Overflow is a question and answer website focused on coding that programmers, both professional and amateur, rely on. Stack Exchange, the parent firm of Stack Overflow, told TechCrunch that the site went down because of a DDoS attack on its network provider. According to Webopedia, a DDoS attack or Distributed Denial of Service is a kind of DOS attack “where multiple compromised systems-which are usually infected with a Trojan-are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Victims of a DDoS attack consist of both the end targeted system and all systems maliciously used and controlled by the hacker in the distributed attack.” Stack Exchange added that the issue has already been “partially mitigated” and the platform is already operational. A 100% free site that does not require any registration, Stack Overflow allows anybody to ask and answer a question. Users vote on the best answers and they then go up to the top. Posts about the outage began to hit micro-blogging site Twitter and Hacker News at about 11 am Pacific Time Sunday. The notes, often humorous, of programmers served as a testament to the importance of the platform to a lot of people, the report said. Some of the Twitter posts about the outage featured in the TechCrunch report included one from Adam (@adamjstevenson) which said, “Stack Overflow being down reminds me how badly I need Stack Overflow in my life.” Another one came from pickett (@pickett) which said “Well, stackoverflow is down. Might as well pack it in and take the day off.” Vineet Shah (@vineetshah), meanwhile, posted “Came to work on a Sunday and Stack Overflow is down EVERYBODY PANIC.” Source: http://www.vcpost.com/articles/21665/20140216/stack-overflow-goes-down-for-an-hour-sunday-due-to-ddos-attack.htm

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Stack Overflow goes down for an hour on Sunday due to DDoS attack

Exchange Halts Payouts as DDoS Attack Pummels Bitcoin

A second major bitcoin exchange suspended withdrawals on Tuesday, amidst widespread attacks on the vast software system that drives the digital currency. Bitstamp, an exchange based on Slovenia, says that it suspended Bitcoin withdrawals due to “inconsistent results” from its online bitcoin wallet caused by a denial-of-service attack, according to a post on the exchange’s Facebook page. “Bitcoin withdrawal processing will be suspended temporarily until a software fix is issued,” the post reads. The news comes a week after the Tokyo-based exchange Mt. Gox suspended Bitcoin payouts, blaming a known bug in the bitcoin software. At the time, outside observers turned the blame on Mt. Gox’s accounting software, but it turns out that the company isn’t the only exchange struggling to cope with the bug. That a known issue like this could lead to the suspension of payouts on two of the world’s most popular bitcoin exchanges underscores the immaturity of bitcoin and the ongoing growing pains of the the world’s most popular digital currency. These growing pains are not just technical, but political. As Bitstamp battles against these attacks, it’s also worth noting that the Slovenian exchange is not listed as a money services business with FINCEN, the U.S. agency that registers money transmitters — even though it accepts US customers. Bitstamp did not respond to a press inquiry from WIRED. But according to Andreas Antonopoulos, the chief security officer with bitcoin wallet-maker, Blockchain, the effects of this week’s attack should be temporary. “It’s a griefer attack,” he says. “All it does is slow down these exchanges.” But the company could eventually run into serious problems with regulators in the U.S. FINCEN expects even foreign-based money transmitters to register if they service US customers. A Bored Teenager With a Computer? Bitstamp’s technical issues came to light after someone — nobody knows who, exactly — started flooding the worldwide bitcoin network with thousands of bad transaction records. Because of a flaw in the bitcoin protocol, it’s possible for the bad guys to create two unique transaction identifiers — called hashes — for legitimate transactions on the network. The official bitcoin ledger, or blockchain, is not fooled by these so-called “malleable transactions”, but some badly written wallet software could be confused. “It’s like creating a fake receipt,” says Antonopoulos. In theory, someone could try and use one of these fake receipts to try and trick an exchange into believing that a bitcoin transfer had not gone through, but a look at the blockchain would clear things up, he explains. It turns out that a small number of these bad transactions have been broadcast in the background of the bitcoin network for some time now, but after Mt. Gox went public with its problems, someone cranked up the volume. “Some joker is rewriting thousands of bitcoin transactions and rebroadcasting them,” says Jeff Garzik, a core developer on the bitcoin software. “It’s not a ‘massive and concerted’ attack, probably just a bored teenager with one computer.” Antonopoulos, who is working with other bitcoin companies to coordinate a response to the attack, says he’s spoken with five exchanges (not including Mt. Gox) about the issue, and that three of them are unaffected by the issue. None of the five exchanges that Antonopoulos has spoken with appear to have lost money because of the issue, he says. Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/bitcoin-ddos/

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Exchange Halts Payouts as DDoS Attack Pummels Bitcoin

Largest ever DDoS attack

CloudFlare said that the attack was close to 400Gbps in size, making it bigger than last year’s DDoS attack against anti-spam outfit Spamhaus, which was measured at just over 300Gbps. Confidentiality stopped CloudFlare from revealing the identify of the customer under attack, and there were few details on how many other companies had been affected. The DDoS attack did, however, seem to pose a bigger threat on European networks, with French hosting outfit OVH later reporting that it had fended off a 350Gbps attack. It’s not known if the same attacker was responsible. Company CEO Matthew Prince responded to the news by saying on Twitter that “someone’s got a big, new cannon” and the attack was the “start of ugly things to come”. While the size of this attack is likely to draw the headlines, it’s worth noting that hackers carried out the DDoS attack by using NTP reflection and amplification techniques, which are increasing common for overwhelming target servers by sending more data packets than switches can support. The attack technique has been seen in relatively recent hacks against online gaming services like Steam, League of Legends and Battle and essentially aims to push big traffic to the target’s Network Timing Protocol (NTP) server. In this instance, attackers used NTP reflection to exploit a weakness in the UDP-based NTP, which connects to the Internet to synchronise clocks on machines. The hackers then spoofed the IP address of the target, and sent DNS queries to open DNS resolvers that will answer requests from anywhere. As a result, overwhelming levels of traffic were sent back to the NTP server. CloudFlare has a detailed blog post on NTP reflection attacks. Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Akamai Technologies, told SCMagazineUK.com that this method of attack troubles unpatched DNS servers, and said that is attractive to attackers because it can reflect huge traffic back to the target. He added that it’s also favourable to the attacker because UTP is “easily spoofed” and because it’s hard for victims to see who is behind the intrusion. “The main reason for using NTP as an attack tool is that it increases traffic by 100 or 200 percent. It’s a great reflection index and makes for a very effective tool if you’re an attacker. “At 400Gbps, it’s conceivable that the attack is being run by a small botnet outputting 20Gbps to 30Gbps of traffic,” he added. McKeay, and other industry commentators, have advised IT administrators to patch and upgrade their NTP servers in light of this attack, although the Akamai exec admitted that some can assume that NTP servers are safe. “NTP servers are often stable and so haven’t often been looked at before. [IT departments] are having to now.” IT administrators are advised, in light of this attack, to patch and upgrade their NTP servers and to check management rights. Speaking recently to SCMagazineUK.com , Visiting Professor John Walker, of Nottingham Trent University, warned that DDoS attacks will continue to be a big threat in 2014, and added that, since company divisions struggle to get their heads around the issue, the firm itself struggles to establish an effective defence strategy. “Since they see the issue solely from their perspective, they cannot hope to develop an effective strategy to deal with this security problem,” he said at the time. A previously unknown division of the UK Government was recently accused of launching DDoS attacks against hactivisim groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec, while a report from the end of last year revealed that most UK companies ignore DDoS threats. Source: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/cloudflare-spots-largest-ever-ddos-attack/article/333480/

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Largest ever DDoS attack

Snapchat Vulnerability Could Lead To iPhone DDoS Attacks

A cyber security researcher has discovered a vulnerability within the Snapchat mobile app that makes it possible for hackers to launch a denial-of-service attack that temporarily freezes a user’s iPhone. Jaime Sanchez, who works as a cyber-security consultant for Telefonica, a major telecommunications company in Spain, said he and another researcher found a weakness in Snapchat’s system that allows hackers to send thousands of messages to individual users in a matter of seconds. Sanchez said he and the fellow researcher discovered the glitch on their own time. Flooding one user with so many messages can clog their account to the point that the Snapchat app causes the entire device to freeze and ultimately crash, or require that the user perform a hard reset. Snapchat is a popular mobile app for iPhone and Android devices that allows users to send each other photo and video messages that disappear a few seconds after they are opened by their recipients. Every time a user attempts to send a message through Snapchat, a token, which is a code made up of letters and numbers, is generated to verify their identity. Sanchez, who wrote about his security findings on seguridadofensiva.com (in Spanish), said a flaw within Snapchat’s system allows hackers to reuse old tokens to send new messages. By reusing old tokens, hackers can send massive amounts of messages using powerful computers. This method could be used by spammers to send messages in mass quantities to numerous users, or it could be used to launch a cyber attack on specific individuals, he said. Sanchez demonstrated how this works by launching a Snapchat denial-of-service attack on my account. He sent my account 1,000 messages within five seconds, causing my device to freeze until it finally shut down and restarted itself. (See the video above.) Launching a denial-of-service attack on Android devices doesn’t cause those smartphones to crash, but it does slow their speed. It also makes it impossible to use the app until the attack has finished. Sanchez said he has not contacted Snapchat about the vulnerability because he claims the Los Angeles startup has no respect for the cyber security research community. He says Snapchat earned that reputation by ignoring advice in August and on Christmas Eve from Gibson Security, a security group that predicted a flaw within the app could be used to expose user data. On New Year’s Eve, another group exploited that vulnerability and exposed the user names and phone numbers of nearly 5 million Snapchat users. “They warned Snapchat about issues — about the possible dump of database — and Snapchat didn’t care,” he said. The Times asked Snapchat if it knew of the vulnerability claimed by Sanchez. Snapchat said it was not aware of the problem. “We are interested in learning more and can be contacted at security@snapchat.com,” a Snapchat spokeswoman wrote in an email reply. Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-snapchat-shut-down-iphone-20140207,0,3127301.story#axzz2sixJmHSh

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Snapchat Vulnerability Could Lead To iPhone DDoS Attacks

The UK allegedly targeted Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivists via a DDOS attack, documents show

The UK allegedly created a spy unit that, other than mounting attacks on cyber enemies, also targeted hacktivists Anonymous and LulzSec, NBC News reports, citing documents taken from the US National Security Agency by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Government Communications Headquarters Communications (GCHQ) — the UK’s intelligence service — launched a DDOS attack to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous Internet chat rooms, according to the documents. NBC News notes that this makes the British government “the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.” The British reportedly aimed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where criminal hackers were believed to have been concentrated, after authorities were alarmed by a spate of hacking attacks in 2011, when online hackers wreaked havoc across the Internet, bringing down websites on a purported crusade of righteousness. The victims included the UK. A GCHQ spokesperson emphasized in a statement to NBC News that it carried out its work “in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework” and that its activities — which it didn’t elaborate on — were “authorized, necessary and proportionate.” Source: http://thenextweb.com/uk/2014/02/05/uk-allegedly-targeted-anonymous-lulzsec-hacktivists-via-ddos-attack-documents-show/#!uyXtM

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The UK allegedly targeted Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivists via a DDOS attack, documents show

Credit unions among industries that suffered more DDoS attacks in 2013

A growing number of data center outages are caused by distributed denial of service attacks. On a technical level, DDoS campaigns are much more complicated to address than other leading causes such as human error or IT equipment failure. Accordingly, they often cost hundred of thousands of dollars to resolve. Throughout 2013, credit unions were increasingly targeted by DDoS attacks that overwhelmed their websites with traffic and sometimes created distractions so that other threats could bypass IT security. Going into 2014, mitigating risk from DDoS through software and backup solutions will be the key to reducing the costs and consequences of IT outages. Report finds that DDoS, equipment failure among the leading causes of outages According to one think tank’s research, DDoS attacks accounted for only 2 percent of outages at 67 U.S. data centers in 2010. By 2013, the share had risen to 18 percent. Perpetrators have benefited from ongoing increases in network speeds and the growing complexity of IT infrastructure, both of which have made it much easier to generate massive amounts of fraudulent traffic. The resulting server and equipment failures have footed IT departments with some steep bills. Outages caused by DDoS attacks typically ran $822,000 apiece, far outpacing the $380,000 price tag for incidents attributable to human error. Equipment issues were the most expensive cause, with each event costing slightly under $1 million. While the length of data center outage has gone down over the past few years, related expenses have risen. The average 2013 incident lasted 86 minutes, but cost $690,204, or 37 percent more than in 2010. Credit unions have felt the impact of more frequent DDoS attacks The rise of DDoS attacks has affected IT operations at credit unions, which were targeted by several prominent campaigns in 2013. A $4 billion credit union in Pleasanton, Calif., and a $1.6 billion one in Austin, Texas, had online services knocked out for hours at a time in the wake of DDoS attacks. More specifically, cybercriminals have honed tactics that put financial institution computers through the motions until they become exhausted. For example, a DDoS attack may ask a site for password resets on thousands of spurious accounts, forcing the system to go through each request. Some DDoS incidents may be distractions that facilitate wire theft, but others are politically motivated. Credit unions may need better preparation against DDoS risk, especially since some simply rely on online banking providers or ISPs to protect data. Restore on reboot software can be easily deployed by IT administrators as part of an imaging solution, and it provides fine-tuned management of all office endpoints. Organizations can ensure that kiosks and cash dispensing services remain active even in the event of a crash or attack. Source: http://www.faronics.com/news/blog/credit-unions-among-industries-that-suffered-more-ddos-attacks-in-2013/

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Credit unions among industries that suffered more DDoS attacks in 2013

JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America targets for DDoS attacks

Major US financial firms JP Morgan Chase and the Bank of America have been targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, according to one hacktivist group. The European Cyber Army has claimed it waged the attack that disrupted online services for customers of the companies between 10:30am and 2:30pm on Tuesday (28 January). It is the latest in a long line of DDoS attacks that the group has admitted to, with the federal court system one organisation recently impacted. Reports suggest the group have also been responsible for disruptive online attacks in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Both the Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase has refused to comment on the attack, but customers took to Twitter to complain about the outage to online services. Several executives at organisations that track DDoS activity confirm they saw indications two leading US banks were hit on Tuesday. The news of the DDoS attacks comes as Aleksandr Panin, the Russian programmer who created the SpyEye bank hacking tool, was successfully prosected in the US. Source: http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2014/Jan/30/jp-morgan-chase-and-bank-of-america-targets-for-ddos-attacks.html

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JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America targets for DDoS attacks

Whaleoil down due to DDOS attack

Controversial right wing website, Whaleoil, has been taken offline by a cyber attack and its editor has received death threats after he labelled a West Coast man killed in a car crash “feral”. A denial of service (DOS) attack started last night, temporarily disabling the blog, and continued today, the website left completely unavailable since 8am. “We are pretty certain it is from New Zealand. We are also pretty certain, due to the fact that they are skiting about it on Facebook, that it is these ferals on the West Coast,” Whaleoil’s editor Cameron Slater said. A DOS attack is intended to block a website from its intended users by overloading the site with requests so it cannot be visited by legitimate traffic. Slater has also received numerous death threats in text messages and on Facebook after a blog in which he described Westcoast man Judd Hall who died on Saturday as a “feral” was reportered in the Greymouth Star. “They are pretty hot under the collar. I wrote a post about that munter who died smacking into that house and a Greymouth Star journalist beat it all up and that set them off in their feral ways,” Slater said. He posted one of the text message threats to his Facebook page that said “we are coming for you” and “we know where you live.” There have been around 250 Facebook messages “imploring me to kill myself or that they are going to come round and kill me in lots of different manners,” Slater said. The threats have been reported to police. It was initially believed that the DOS attack was from the sub-continent after another blog on the site revealed India web traffic to the news site Scoop. “Now with the gloating that is going on from the West Coast ferals we are pretty certain it is them that are involved in it,” Slater said. The website should be back online shortly but the DOS attack has left Slater without a large amount of advertising income. “I don’t discuss my revenues. It is basically a day and a half of revenue,” he said. A DOS attack is illegal under the Crimes Act and is punishable with up to seven years in prison. Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/30013080/whaleoil-down-due-to-dos-attack

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Whaleoil down due to DDOS attack

Education sector is fastest growing for DDoS mitigation

The education sector is the fastest growing segment in taking up distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, according to DDoS protection services firm DOSarrest. The firm’s CTO Jag Bains told Computing that many companies -not just e-commerce firms – are deploying DDoS protection. “If their website goes down as a result of an attack, they can lose their SEO ranking or it could have an effect on their brand, there is a lot at stake aside from revenues,” he said. And despite there not being a particular industry that looks at DDoS protection as a must, DOSarrest’s general manager, Mark Teolis claimed that the education sector is one area which has grown significantly. “Our fastest growing segment in the last six months is the education sector believe it or not,” he said. Teolis explained that the firm was getting business from “schools from the UK, the US and international universities” but said he couldn’t identify a specific reason as to why the sector has shown a sudden interest. Bains believes that it may be as a result of educational institutes guarding themselves against their own students. “Students have easy access to DDoS tools, so they may want to try it against their own [school or university]. They could be motivated because they’re failing in something, and there are enough smart kids around to access tools – it is easy to Google them anyway,” he said. But Teolis said that the tools have been available on the internet for a long time, so questioned why there was a sudden surge in interest from educational institutes. Bains suggested that it could be because the school and university websites have become an integral part of the education system. “We’ve been talking about e-commerce and gaming [as being key industries for DDoS protection], but web presence itself is very important and schools and universities need to make their websites accessible. They need a website to give out grades, information and schedules – five years ago they weren’t really using the web page apart from explaining where the school is located,” he said. But while the education sector may be taking a keen interest, Teolis claims that there is not one segment that is “taking up 30 per cent of the market”. He said that “10 or 15 per cent of the market is as good as it gets”. As for a particular industry that has not taken DDoS as seriously as others, Teolis believes many e-commerce firms haven’t contemplated being the victim of a DDoS attack. “There are still the odd e-commerce guys out there [who haven’t taken it as seriously]. Money is rolling in and they’re just focused on that; DDoS for them is somebody else’s problem. A lot of it is ‘my ISP will deal with it’, the fact of the matter is, it is difficult to stop all of the attacks,” he said. Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2325009/education-sector-is-fastest-growing-for-ddos-mitigation-dosarrest

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Education sector is fastest growing for DDoS mitigation

Former hacker Mitchell Frost explains his motivation for launching a DDoS attack

In 2006, Mitchell Frost, then a 19-year-old college student at the University of Akron, used the school’s computer network to control the botnets he had created. Authorities say between August 2006 and March 2007, Frost launched a series of denial of service (DDOS) attacks against several conservative web sites, including Billoreilly.com, Anncoulter.com and Rudy Giuliani’s campaign site, Joinrudy2008.com. He is accused of taking down the O’Reilly site five times, as well as disrupting the University of Akron’s network during a DDOS attack Frost allegedly launched on a gaming server hosted by the university. Frost’s dorm room at the university was raided in March 2007. What followed, according to Frost, was a long, complicated legal battle that ultimately lead to him spending over two years behind bars and owing thousands of dollars in legal and restitution fees for his crimes. Frost was released from prison in 2012 and is now serving probation. Frost took the time to talk to CSO about his experience and delves into the reasons why he did it, his thoughts on the punishment he received and his plans for the future. Tell us about your background. How did you become so knowledgeable about computers and when did hacking become something that interested you? I started on computers around a young age and I have always had a mind that wants to keep exploring and learning. Hacking didn’t start overnight, it all started by networking really. First I wanted to be able to have music without paying for it, so I joined some chat rooms on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). IRC is not used much, it’s typically used only by smaller groups of hackers and gamers. When I was younger I would spend many hours in a row on the computer, and when I woke up or had free time, just continue on with what I was working on. You build skills and make connections with others and keep moving up until you have background in hacking. Let’s just say I built my way up over the years 2000-2007. What inspired you to do the kind of hacking you did in 2006 and 2007 to those conservative web sites? What were you hoping to accomplish by hacking those particular sites? How did you choose your targets and why? In 2006, I was young and, even at that age, I could see there was a lot of corruption and media propaganda going on in newspapers and on television. At that time, I had a rather large and complicated botnet. With the botnet, I was able to use the compromised computers for almost anything; key strokes, DDOS, servers, passwords, pranks. I had several botnets over the years from a few to thousands and didn’t do a whole lot of DDOS on servers because I had no need to. I decided that I had to do something about what I was seeing in the world around me, so I knocked a couple of websites offline at the time thinking it will prevent the hate and conflict and fear mongering from being seen by people. When it became clear you were going to face punishment for the attacks, did you think it would mean jail time? They raided me in March of 2007 right after spring break. They took some computer stuff and took my roommate’s stuff and had three agencies do the raid (FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security) all with guns pointed right at my head. They brought me into a room and said “if you help yourself now it will be easier at sentencing.” I didn’t answer any questions. They released me and didn’t say much. I was scared shitless after that. I didn’t know what to do. I remember now going to a class after the raid to take a math test and was shaking so bad. About one day later, they expelled me from the school, even though I was not charged with anything yet. I moved back home and then contacted the Federal Public Defenders office in Cleveland and was assigned a lawyer. He said cases like mine take time and to stay out of trouble and he would get back to me. I moved back home and got a job working as a carpet-cleaning technician. From 2007 and on, I tried to live a normal life but had that fear that something was coming. I ended up meeting my wife. We fell in love and she got pregnant in December of 2009. Around May of 2010, my lawyer said I randomly received a judge and that it didn’t look good because of her previous sentencing history. I was hoping for maybe a small amount of time or probation, considering I did not get arrested at the time of the raid in March 2007 and had not yet. I was living in fear for almost 4 years, not going to friends or out to parties and all that. The judge ended up giving me 30 months and tried to place me under arrest right at the sentencing hearing. When she did this, it took the prosecutor and my lawyer to walk up to the bench and say I am not a flight risk with a newborn on the way and I knew about these potential charges for three years, so why couldn’t I self-report? She finally agreed to let me self-report so I can tie up some things with my family before my time. There was some debate after your sentencing about whether or not the penalty was too harsh. Do you think it was too extreme? Way too extreme. Who was the victim? Yes, a couple of people had their servers down for a small period of time, but the jacked-up estimates of the damages were over inflated. Example: they said it took $10,000 for them to press one button on one switch to get access back to the network. The reasoning for the sentence has to do with amount of money lost, etc. Bill O’Reilly said he needed to spend $300,000 to upgrade his systems. My lawyer did not fight or really look into their claims of money loss. I think they should of come to some plea with me within a year of the initial raid so I could of dealt with this problem and moved on with my life. Maybe do 3-4 months in some low-security prison and some intensive probation would have been the same. Now it will end up costing me about 10 years of my life — 2006 started it and by the time I’m off probation it will be 2016. All for taking some servers offline. You tell me: is that fair? What has this experience taught you? The experience is not over yet and is far from. I have learned to keep to myself when I see something unjust or unfair or unbalanced all I can do is stay clear of it and talk to people I know or influence and explain my point of view without any damages, physical or monetary. Last year, there was a lot of sadness and discussion around the suicide of Reddit co-founder Aaron Schwartz. As you know, Schwartz was facing a trial after being arrested on allegations of breaching a computer network to download millions of pages of documents kept at MIT. Many feel he was being too harshly prosecuted for the crime and it drove him to suicide. What are your thoughts on that, having faced a sentence yourself? I am very familar with Aaron Schwartz. Did you know he chose to take his case to trial because he was not guilty? He was murdered and it was made to look like a suicide. Who would ignore a plea deal with no jail time, wait for trial and then commit suicide? All he did was download some stuff from the MIT library — most of it was like 30 years old. He was prosecuted because of his ties to a grassroots movement for Internet freedom. What’s next for you? What are you plans for the future? I am rebuilding my life the best I can for having limited resources. I was released Election Day 2012. I was stuck living in a halfway house in the slums of Toledo, Ohio. Then I had to go up the chain of the BOP and the halfway house to get released to home detention. That took about 2.5 months. I started probation on March 8th, 2013. I work at a small store in a town where my wife’s parents let us live in a rental, so we pay them what we can. I pretty much cannot go to school because I owe so much to U of Akron and I have $50,000 in fines and restitution. They take a percentage of my pay each check to give to Bill O’Reilly. I guess when you’re worth $50 million, why not ruin some guy’s life and future and suck every check he makes? I guess my life is not going anywhere until I am off probation. I would like to be a wireless network security consultant, or a real news reporter for the independent media. I will continue to try and make my son and wife’s life the best I can for the position I am in. Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245624/Why_I_did_it_Former_hacker_Mitchell_Frost_explains_his_motivation?source=rss_latest_content

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Former hacker Mitchell Frost explains his motivation for launching a DDoS attack