14 DAY TRIAL // 19-years-old Jordan Jones, who directed a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against the Metropolitan Police in London, has been spared from going to jail by a judge who said that he was manipulated by others to commit the crime.
A DoS incident is not a complicated form of computer attack and it consists in directing large numbers of packets to a system until its capacity to process them is completely impaired and it no longer functions.
The young boy could have done notable damage
The event occurred last year in August, when Jones managed to disrupt the activity of the Met Police website, on multiple occasions. First, he brought the site down for half an hour, but a second attack proved to be sturdier, producing “significant disruption,” according to Gazette Live.
The teenager did not stop at this, and in October 2013 he again resolved to flooding the web server with requests so that the web page became inaccessible.
Thousands of people turn to the Metropolitan Police website in search for advice about crime or to report offenses.
The reason for the judge’s decision to set the hacker free was partly because since his arrest last year, Jones made efforts to redeem himself by working with different organizations and helping them identify security flaws in their security systems.
On the same note, the Metropolitan Police said that the actions carried out by Jones caused only minimal disruption, although he could have created more significant damage.
For instance, during his attacks, he broke into the website of the law enforcement organization (hacked into a shop front) but did not proceed to interfere with the operational capabilities.
Asperger syndrome, good behavior and granny – the hacker's “get out of jail” free card
This is in part what earned him the good will of the judge. It appears that by the hacker’s side in court was also his grandmother, who pleaded for his changed behavior and told the judge that she had monitored his computer activity.
It is unclear in what way she achieved it, as no additional details about this have surfaced.
Furthermore, the teenager has Asperger's syndrome, which is considered a high functioning form of autism; this is actually what made the judge consider the decision, saying that he was vulnerable and that his computer skills had been taken advantage of “by people who like to cause problems with computer at high levels.”
“The shop front is where the public can access a website to report concerns,” Gazette Live was told by Liz McGowan, defense attorney in August, this year, when Jones appeared in court and pleaded guilty to all charges.
Although the hacker has not been ordered time in jail, he is not to get away without being punished.