A County Antrim man has been handed a suspended sentence for his role in a series of cyber-attacks when he was a teenager.
A distributed denial of service attack is an attempt to take a website offline by overwhelming it with internet traffic. Judge Roseanne McCormick KC said an aggravating factor in the case was that the majority of offences were committed while the defendant was on bail for a similar incident.The fallout from the attack cost the company £77m.
Judge McCormick KC said she was “mindful of the fact this is a young offender with specific challenges in his life.She also took into account that the case had taken a long time to come before the court and that the defendant used that time to “better himself”.But there were exceptional circumstances - his guilty pleas, the time the case has been “hanging over his head” and his low chance of re-offending lead her to suspend the sentence.