by C.J. EdgarIn 2006 19 year old Jason Salah Arabo, from Southfield, Michigan, was charged with conspiracy to cause the transmission of a program, information, code, and command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally cause damage without authorization, to a protected computer, and was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $504,495 in restitution to his victims. Involved in the same crime, Jasmine Singh (who plead guilty to two counts of computer theft in New Jersey State Superior Court) was sentenced to five years in prison, and ordered to pay $35,000 in restitution for damages.
In 2004 Arabo was running two web-based companies, www.customleader.com and www.jerseydomain.com, that specialized in selling sports related apparel when he met online Jasmine Singh, who went by the online name "Pherk". Arabo discovered that Singh was able to conduct distributed denial of service (or DDOS) attacks on computer servers and disable the websites those servers support. He asked Singh to take down the websites of some of his competitors in return for merchandise.
Arabo believed that once his competitors' websites were taken down his own business would improve, so from July to December 2004, he identified to Singh which websites he wanted disabled. Arabo pressed Singh to disable these sites for as long as possible and sent him merchandise, including designer sneakers, in exchange for successful attacks. The attacks stopped in December 2004 after Singh's computer was seized by FBI agents and New Jersey State Police investigators during a search of his home.
On March 18, 2005 Arabo was charged by criminal complaint, according to which the computer attacks were conducted by Singh from his personal computer. Singh had secretly infected thousands of computers with a "bot" program that enabled him to remotely access and control computers it infected. He would then order hundreds of these bot infected computers (sometimes known as "slaves" or "zombies") to access the targeted websites all at once, flooding the hosting server with information and overloading it, causing it to crash.
These attacks allegedly caused harm and disruption to internet and computer services beyond just the businesses Arabo targeted. A number of unrelated businesses (some allegedly as far away as Europe) were using the same internet servers and thus were also negatively affected by the attacks. The attacks disrupted the operations of major online retailers, banks, and companies that provide communications, data backup, and information services to the medical and pharmaceutical industries. The attacks disrupted crucial services including internet access, corporate websites, email, data storage, and disaster recovery systems. There was no estimate of the total financial losses due to the attacks.
Jason Salah Arabo plead guilty on April 12, 2006 before US District Judge Joseph E. Irenas. Jasmine Singh, who was 16 at the time of the attacks, plead guilty as an adult in August 2005.
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