A New Mexican man has been dragged to court for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against business competitors, public services and also the websites of his former employers.
The accused, John Kelsey Gammell, 55, who is a convicted felon that had been prohibited from possessing firearm and ammunition, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit intentional damage to a protected computer in the US.
Gammell admitted to launching several DDoS attacks on websites in the US between July 2015 and March 2017.
DDoS attacks carried out by Gammell were targeted at companies that he worked for before and those that refused to hire his service. Apart from those attacks mentioned above, he also targeted law enforcement websites, his business competitors, Colleges and others.
According to the department of justice, Gammell purchased DDoS for hire service from several DDoS companies such as Inboot, Booter.xyz, CStress, VDos to launch his attacks. To make his transactions and his location untraceable, Gammell used IP addresses to hide his address and location whenever he hired the service of those DDoS for hire sites.
The accused used spoofed emails to transact as well as using cryptocurrency as his form of making payments. He also used encryption and drive-cleaning tools to hide digital evidence.
Victims of Gammell's cyber attack includes the Minnesota State Courts, Dakota County Technical College, Washburn Computer Group, the Hennepin County Sheriff's office, and many others.
Gammell is scheduled to face sentencing at a later date.