A person behind a October 2016 cyberattack that temporarily crippled Sony’s Playstation Network and other online services has pleaded guilty to committing the act as a juvenile, Justice Department officials in New Hampshire said Thursday.
Because the individual was a minor at the time, details about the incident, including the offender’s identity, remain sealed.
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For no fewer than 11 months, officials said, the individual “conspired with others” to create possibly multiple botnets, one of which was used in 2016 to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against the PlayStation Network. Sony estimated its revenue loss at $2.7 million, according to DOJ.
The attack also temporarily affected access to Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix, among other sites, for some internet users.
The former-juvenile offender’s sentence will be decided next month.
Last year, a 23-year-old Utah man received a 27-month prison sentence for a series of DDoS attacks targeting online gaming services, including those of PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox.
DDoS attacks on gaming servers were, for a time, an annual occurrence around the holidays. In 2018, the Justice Department joined with law enforcement agencies in the UK and Netherlands to target DDoS-fire-hire servers ahead of the season in what ZDNet termed a “preemptive strike.”
