A person behind a October 2016 cyberattack that temporarily crippled Sony’s Playstation Network and other online services has pleaded guilty to committing the act as a juvenile, Justice Department officials in New Hampshire said Thursday.
Because the individual was a minor at the time, details about the incident, including the offender’s identity, remain sealed.
For no fewer than 11 months, officials said, the individual “conspired with others” to create possibly multiple botnets, one of which was used in 2016 to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against the PlayStation Network. Sony estimated its revenue loss at $2.7 million, according to DOJ.
The attack also temporarily affected access to Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix, among other sites, for some internet users.
The former-juvenile offender’s sentence will be decided next month.
Last year, a 23-year-old Utah man received a 27-month prison sentence for a series of DDoS attacks targeting online gaming services, including those of PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox.
DDoS attacks on gaming servers were, for a time, an annual occurrence around the holidays. In 2018, the Justice Department joined with law enforcement agencies in the UK and Netherlands to target DDoS-fire-hire servers ahead of the season in what ZDNet termed a “preemptive strike.”