A Spanish hacker who launched a denial of service attack that hobbled the net connections of an estimated three million users has been jailed for two years and fined 1.4m. Santiago Garrido, 26, (AKA Ronnie and Mike25) launched the attack using a computer worm in retaliation for been banned from the popular “Hispano” IRC chat room for breaking its rules.

The resulting surge in malicious traffic disrupted an estimated three million users of Wanadoo, ONO, Lleida Net and other ISPs, or approximately a third of Spain’s net users, at the time of the 2003 attack.

Source: The Register

Graham Cluely of Sophos states:

This type of activity causes serious damage and disruption, and any hackers engaged in such behaviour must be punished accordingly. The Spanish Civil Guard should be congratulated for seeing this case through to its conclusion

Sophos believes that more than 60 per cent of all spam today originates from zombie computers, which can be used by criminal hackers to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, spread unwanted email messages or to steal confidential information