At the end of a nine-day trial, a jury in California this week found guilty the administrator of two distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) operations.
32-year old Matthew Gatrel of St. Charles, Illinois, ran two websites that allowed paying users to launch more than 200,000 DDoS attacks on targets in both the private and public sector.
Booter service and bulletproof server hosting
Court documents reveal that Gatrel had been operating the DDoS services since at least October 2014. He ran two sites, DownThem and Ampnode, both enabling DDoS attacks.
Gatrel used DownThem to sell subscriptions for his DDoS services (also called “booters“ or “stressers“) and AmpNode offered “bulletproof” server hosting options to customers that needed servers pre-configured with DDoS attack scripts and lists of vulnerable systems that could amplify the assault.
When going through the records of the DownThem booter website, the investigators found it had more than 2,000 registered customers. According to the documents, users are responsible for launching over 200,000 DDoS attacks.
