Slashdot: Man Used DDoS Attacks On Media To Extort Them To Remove Stories

Man Used DDoS Attacks On Media To Extort Them To Remove Stories
Published on August 02, 2017 at 08:05PM
New submitter troublemaker_23 shares a report from iTWire: A 32-year-old man from Seattle who was arrested for mounting a series of distributed denial of service attacks on businesses in Australia, the U.S. and Canada, wanted articles about himself removed from various news sites, including Fairfax Media. According to an FBI chargesheet filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Dallas Division), Kamyar Jahanrakhshan tried to get articles removed from the Sydney Morning Herald, a site for legal articles known as Leagle.com, Metronews.ca, a Canadian news website, CBC in Canada and Canada.ca. The chargesheet, filed by FBI special agent Matthew Dosher, said Jahanrakhshan migrated to the U.S. in 1991 and took U.S. citizenship; he then moved to Canada about four years later and became a permanent resident there. He had a conviction for second degree theft in Washington state in 2005 and this was vacated in August 2011; he also had a 2011 conviction for fraud and obstruction in Canada. In each case, Jahanrakhshan, who was deported back to the U.S. as a result of the Canada crime, launched DDoS attacks on the news websites and then contacted them. Further reading: Ars Technica