Adam Mudd from Kings Langley, a town north of London in the United Kingdom, pleaded guilty for doing unauthorised acts with intent to impair the operation of a computer, a charge of making, supplying or offering to supply the Titanium Stresser programme, and concealing criminal property. Mudd is believed to have developed the Titanium Stresser when he was 15, and that he used the service himself 594 times against 181 individual IP addresses, employing the username “themuddfamily” between September 2013 and March 2015, the month Mudd was arrested and the service shut down. The investigators were able to find out that the service had been used for 1.8 million DDoS attacks, as Mudd had preserved detailed logs of all attacks. His platform had become one of the most popular services, even offering free 60-second DDoS attacks. Before Mudd turned 18 years old, he earned more than £300,000 ($365,000) from renting his DDoS tool to other hackers to undertake their own DDoS attacks, according to England’s Eastern Region Special Operations Unit, a police special task force. “Titanium Stresser is a computer program created by the defendant, and it is not an unimpressive piece of software in terms of design,” prosecutor Jonathan Polnay told the court. “It carried out DDoS attacks and it takes down computer networks and websites. The defendant charged for use of it, to others all around the world – these offenses truly had a global reach – would pay money to use this program.” Polnay said there were 1.7 million attacks, taking down websites and computers around the world, “no doubt causing considerable damage and loss to others.” At this stage, it is unclear how much jail time Mudd may be facing. The judge who accepted the guilty plea did note that “a spell in a youth offenders institution will be considered” when the sentence hearing takes place in December. Mudd’s attorney, Ben Cooper, told the court that his client has been diagnosed as autistic, and is currently undergoing psychological evaluation. He lives with his parents and works as a hotel porter. “Adam Mudd’s case is a regrettable one, because this young man clearly has a lot of skill, but he has been utilizing that talent for personal gain at the expense of others,” Detective Inspector Martin Peters, head of the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit’s cybercrime team, which arrested Mudd, said in a statement issued after the suspect pleaded guilty. “We want to make clear it is not our wish to unnecessarily criminalize young people, but want to harness those skills before they accelerate into crime,” Peters added.
