Cyber Crime

A New Mexico man sentenced to 15 Years in jail for DDoS Attacks and possession of firearms

A New Mexico man admitted being responsible for
DDoS attacks against the websites of former employers, business competitors, and public services.

John Kelsey Gammell, 55, from New Mexico has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on dozens of organizations and for firearms-related charges.

The man used popular ‘services of “DDoS-for-hire” companies to power DDoS attacks against its victims,  cyberattacks, including VDoS, CStress, Inboot, Booter.xyz, and IPStresser.

The list of the victims is long and include business competitors, former employers, law enforcement agencies, courts, banks, telecoms companies, and firms that refused to hire him.

The man used VPN services to hide his identity and cryptocurrency for his payments, but he was identified due to a poor ops sec. The man sent emails to the victims while they were under DDoS attacks and proposed his services to mitigate the problems. The mails were sent from Gmail and Yahoo accounts he accessed from his home without masquerading his real IP address.

The man initially rejected a plea deal, but in January he pleaded guilty to commit intentional damage to a protected computer, admitting to launching DDoS attacks on websites in the United States in the period between July 2015 and March 2017. He also pleaded guilty to two counts of being a felon-in-possession of firearms and ammunition.

The man was condemned to 180-month in jail and will have to compensate the victims of his DDoS attacks, the overall amount will be determined soon.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – distributed denial-of-service, cybercrime)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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