A 19-year-old was given 3 years in prison for having guns and 2 years of probation for hacking
A man from Manitoba has been given time in prison after pleading guilty to making 3D-printed guns and launching thousands of long-term cyberattacks across Canada and the United States.
The man, who was under 18 when he did the crimes, was sentenced in provincial court in Brandon, Man., on Tuesday. He was arrested in March 2022, after Brandon police and a branch of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation worked together to find out what happened. The operation found out that he was involved in a number of distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks.
A DDoS attack sends a flood of web traffic to a specific organization and overwhelms it, making it impossible to reach and causing it to close down.
During Tuesday’s sentencing hearing, Crown prosecutor Rich Lonstrup said, “It is literally meant to overwhelm the system of any company, corporation, or technological entity that it goes after.”
The man is now 19, but he can’t be named because he wasn’t an adult when the attacks happened. He was also charged with making guns in his apartment using a 3D printer.
On Tuesday, he was given a sentence of three years in prison for making and having illegal guns and two years of supervised probation for the cyberattacks, less the time he had already spent in jail.
The Supreme Security Team name was used by the man and another person in Texas to carry out cyberattacks for money between August 2019 and November 2021.
During the sentencing, Lonstrup said that the defendant and his partner sold different levels of attacks, which he said showed that they had planned and were smart.
“He can’t wash his hands of what his customers do, not when he’s the one who gives them the gun and, in some cases, wants to make money off of it,” Lonstrup said.
The Crown prosecutor said there is no way to know how much money the accused made from the attacks.
Ghost gun productio
Lonstrup said that when Brandon police got involved in the case, they looked at a list of 97,115 DDoS attacks, which included attacks on big businesses, school districts, and political groups like the Until Freedom and Black Lives Matter movements.
The Vancouver police found out about the DDoS attacks when the cryptocurrency business CoinPayments told them about attacks on its service.
CoinPayments was a customer of Path Protection Services, a company that helps protect companies from DDoS attacks, and Path Protection documented the attacks.
In a strange turn of events, Lonstrup said that the person who was accused was actually a customer of CoinPayments and Path Protection Services.
“He’s all but literally fighting the hand that fed him and protected him,” Lonstrup said.
The most worrying thing is that the cyberattacks may have been used to help pay for the making of “ghost guns,” which are homemade weapons that can’t be found.
When the man was taken into custody, police found a 3D printer that was making what they thought were gun parts.
“The idea of guns being made almost from scratch is scary,” Lonstrup said. “It doesn’t matter if this was done for money or for fun; it was stupid, shocking, and cruelly indifferent to the harm it caused.”
After the man first admitted to the charges in November, he was given bail and told he couldn’t use computers or the internet. The Crown said that giving him access to those tools would be like giving a toddler a gun.
The man broke his terms by being in a home with a computer and access to the internet. He was taken back into custody.
‘Misused his intelligence
The man, who just turned 19, cried during his sentencing and said he was sorry for what he had done and how it had hurt his mom, family, and friends, some of whom were in the courtroom.
The man’s lawyer, Mike Cook, said that the man has never been arrested before.
Cook said that he has a Grade 10 education but wants a Grade 12 education. The defense said that he has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, separation anxiety, and Asperger’s syndrome.
He has been taking medications while in jail, and he wants to go to a federal prison because it has programs that would help him get better.
“He can do amazing things. He knows a lot about how computers work…. I guess it’s a double-edged sword, which is too bad “Cook said.
“He had the ability to do bad things with a computer, and he is responsible for that. He hasn’t used his smarts well.”
Cook said that his client has been locked up since June 11, 2022, and has been thinking about how he went wrong.
The defense lawyer said that he is now thinking about the future, his family, and his friends.
“Many people back him,” Cook said. “This is a mother who is always there for her son…. Having a mom in the corner is great.”