Teen hacker pleads guilty in cyberattack that targeted PlayStation, Netflix, Amazon

Updated: 11:20 AM EST Dec 10, 2020

A teenager pleaded guilty in a New Hampshire court in a cyberattack that targeted PlayStation, Amazon, Netflix and several other companies, which resulted in a massive disruption to the internet in October 2016.The teen, who was not named because of their age, admitted conspiring to commit computer fraud and abuse by operating a botnet and by intentionally damaging a computer. The teen will be sentenced on Jan. 7.According to federal investigators, from approximately 2015 until November of 2016, the teen worked with others to create and operate online botnets to launch cyberattacks, specifically targeting online gamers or gaming platforms to take those computers offline altogether or otherwise significantly impair their functionality. These attacks are often referred to as “Distributed Denial of Service” or “DDoS” attacks, investigators said.The teen and others created a botnet that targeted “Internet-of-Things” devices, such as internet-connected video cameras and recorders, and turned them into bots to be used to launch DDoS attacks, investigators said. According to court documents, on Oct. 21, 2016, the teen and others used the botnet to launch several DDoS attacks aimed to take the Sony PlayStation Network’s gaming platform offline for a sustained period. The DDoS attacks impacted a domain name resolver, New Hampshire-based Dyn, Inc., which caused websites, including those pertaining to Sony, Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, Tumblr, Netflix and Southern New Hampshire University, to become either completely inaccessible, or accessible only intermittently for several hours that day, investigators said. Sony said its losses from the attack resulted in $2.7 million in net revenue.