Security News > 2020 > December > Teen who shook the Internet in 2016 pleads guilty to DDoS attacks
One of the operators behind a Mirai botnet pleaded guilty to their involvement in a huge DDoS attack that caused a massive Internet disruption during October 2016.
The botnet, a variant of the Mirai botnet, was developed by the defendant with the help of others between roughly 2015 until November 2016, specifically for being used to target gaming platforms in DDoS attacks.
The defendant, a minor when the attacks took place, and his conspirators targeted their massive DDoS attack at the Sony PlayStation Network's gaming platform but it also affected the systems of Domain Name System provider Dyn.
The huge 2016 Dyn DDoS attack resulted in a massive Internet disruption later spread to hundreds of thousands of sites that used the DNS provider's services.
The massive DDoS attack indirectly affected Dyn's servers and brought down a substantial part of the Internet across both North America and Europe together with Sony's PlayStation Network, the primary target of the attack.