Security News > 2020 > January > DDoS Mitigation Firm Founder Admits to DDoS

A Georgia man who co-founded a service designed to protect companies from crippling distributed denial-of-service attacks has pleaded to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

DDoS attacks involve flooding a target Web site with so much junk Internet traffic that it can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors.

Preston was featured in the 2016 KrebsOnSecurity story DDoS Mitigation Firm Has History of Hijacks, which detailed how the company he co-founded - BackConnect Security LLC - had developed the unusual habit of hijacking Internet address space it didn't own in a bid to protect clients from attacks.

The 2016 story on BackConnect featured an interview with a former system administrator at FSF who said the nonprofit briefly considered working with BackConnect, and that the attacks started almost immediately after FSF told the company's owners they would need to look elsewhere for DDoS protection.

Perhaps having fun at the expense of the FSF was something of a meme that the accused and his associates seized upon, but it's interesting to note that the name of the FSF's founder - Richard Stallman - was used as a nickname by the co-author of Mirai, a potent malware strain that was created for the purposes of enslaving Internet of Things devices for large-scale DDoS attacks.

News URL

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/01/ddos-mitigation-firm-founder-admits-to-ddos/