A 19-year-old teenager admitted to organizing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Australian government websites as part of a larger Anonymous campaign.Steve Slayo, from Roxburgh Park, appeared before a judge in Melbourne Magistrates' Court yesterday and pleaded guilty to four charges, including unauthorised access to restricted data and inciting others to impair electronic communications.
According to the prosecution, on February 10, acting under the online pseudonym of "Rand," Slayo instructed others to attack the wbesites of communications minister Stephen Conroy and then prime minister Kevin Rudd.
He was also an operator (high privileges) on an IRC channel used to organize the DDoS attacks against various federal websites.
The purpose of these attacks was to attract media attention and "embarrass the government over its stated policy of imposing internet filters."
The teenager's actions resulted in disruptions on several websites, including Mr. Conroy's and the Parliament's, which suffered a downtime of over five hours.
According to the
Sydney Morning Herald, Slayo's defense lawyer, Melainie Vinton argued that the teenager only forwarded directives from the American co-ordinators of the attacks, including an individual known as "Pulsar."
She also told the magistrate that the teenager had legitimate concerns regarding Internet censorship and that he even wrote a letter to Mr. Conroy protesting to the government's Internet filtering plan, but never sent it.
The attacks Slayo helped instrument were part of an campaign called Operation Titstorm launched by Anonymous, a group of hacktivists claiming to fight for freedom of information and other digital rights.
Slayo is scheduled to be sentenced next month, but he won't be the first to be punished for participating in Anonymous-orchestrated attacks.
Dmitriy Guzner, 19, from Verona, New Jersey, and Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, 20, of Grand Island, Nebraska, previously
received one-year prison sentences for taking part in Anonymous DDoS attacks against the Chruch of Scientology websites.
For the past two months, the notorious group has been involved in a new campaign targeting the entertainment industry and anti-piracy groups, which is dubbed Operation Payback.
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