Un hacker adolescente se ha embolsado más de 300.000 libras de un programa informático que desarrolló él mismo y que se ha utilizado hasta en 1,7 millones de ataques a páginas web de todo el mundo, según recoge The Guardian. Para Adam Mudd, residente de Hertfordshire (United Kingdom), nevertheless, el dinero no es lo más importante, sino impresionar una comunidad de jugadores online.
El estudiante de informática con el síndrome de Asperger tenía 16 años cuando desarrolló el programa en septiembre de 2013, después de abandonar la escuela para evitar el acoso escolar. El programa se utilizó para atacar páginas webs de colegios y universidades como la de Cambridge, Essex y East Anglia, some incidents that cost those centers millions of pounds.
Mudd, who now has 20 years, charged users who wanted to hack a site in dollars or bitcoins. He managed to attack in a few months, in fact, more than 666.000 IP addresses, of which some 53.000 were located in the United Kingdom. Minecraft, Xbox Live and TeamSpeak were on his list of targets, as already happened with RuneScape, which had to defend itself from more than 25.000 Attacks. This virtual offensive cost the company about 6 millions of pounds.
All in all, Mudd has pleaded guilty to three crimes involving the deterioration of computer operations, violation of the Computer Misuse Act and concealing criminal property. Prosecutor Jonathan Polnay told The Guardian that the program has had a global effect. “He is a young man who lived at home. He wasn't doing it to follow a lifestyle. His motivation wasn't money, but status. He sought friendship from the gaming community. But in the end, he got carried away by bravado and showmanship”.
The police arrested him in March 2015, when he was in his bedroom bed with his laptop, but he was released on bail. All these backgrounds led to his expulsion from the university, where they had defined him as a person “brilliant”. Desde entonces, he has put aside the role of hacker to work as a kitchen assistant in a restaurant.
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