We’re sure some of you guys have come across the term “DDoS” before, which basically stands for distributed denial-of-service and is an attack on a particular machine or network in an attempt to shut it down or interrupt its service. There are many ways one can go about doing that, although a pretty popular way would be to flood the website with requests or large bits of data until its servers are unable to handle the load, thus crashing and taking the website(s) offline for a period of time. This is obviously illegal and if you’re wondering just how much trouble you could land yourself in for participating in a DDoS? Well a certain Eric J. Rosol has found out by being slapped with an $183,000 fine.
Rosol recently plead guilty to taking part in Anonymous’ OpWisconsin where he admitted to participating in a DDoS attack on the Koch Industries’ website that lasted for only a minute. The attack managed to take the website down for about 15 minutes and according to estimates, the loss sustained by Koch Industries was less than $5,000, a good deal less than the fine Rosol is facing. The reason behind the huge fine? Apparently this is to cover the expenses that Koch Industries had to pay to a consulting firm to better secure its servers. The fine is currently being appealed and while performing a DDoS is illegal, a fine of $183,000 seems excessive compared to the loss of $5,000. What do you guys think?