The British Court has given a 32 months jail sentence to a London hacker, Daniel Kaye due to an attack he waged against Lonestar who is MTN’s Librarian subsidiary in 2017. The court was ruled last week and revealed who the company was and who paid for the hack.
Daniel Kaye was a British citizen and was educated in Israel. However, he was a self-taught hacker and this proved to be his undoing. The hacker was paid £30,000 by a rival company to disrupt Lonestar’s services between October 2016 and February 2017.
Kaye, from Egham, Surrey, is to face charges for these actions and pleaded guilty to two offences under the Computer Misuse Act.
According to UK prosecutor, Kaye made a rolling arrangement with a third party who worked for Cellcom under which he was paid 30,000 US dollars (£23,000) between late 2015 and early 2016.
The hacker adapted an existing virus to create a botnet variant called Mirai £14 whose purpose was to trigger DDoS assaults on internet networks using different devices which he was then able to control. The prosecutor suggested that the devices became a conduit for the attack upon the Lonestar servers, with the effect of overwhelming it with the sheer number of connections. However, according to the prosecutor, this made Lonestar’s servers to collapse and not operate properly.
The court heard that the company experienced a decrease in revenue from 84 million US dollars (£65.3 million) to 17 million US dollars (£13.2 million) between October 2015 and February 2016. The company spent US$600,000 repairing the damage after the attack.
There were two things that tripped up hacker Kaye otherwise it would go unnoticed. Firstly, the DDoS attack was designed in such a way that it inadvertently caused Deutsche Telkom’s users to lose their internet connections. According to the UK Guardian, it took control of 900,000 routers and denied 1.25 million customers internet access. It also affected the Cologne water treatment facility and other telephony systems.
This resulted in German prosecutors charging him.He then admitted in Court that he was acting for a Liberian client in July 2017. Secondly, he was a British Citizen and the UK’s National Criminal Agency worked with international agencies (including the Germans and Cypriots) to track him down bring him to justice.
The time he carried out the attacks he lived in Cyprus. However, Kaye was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London in February 2017 under a European Police Warrant in relation to interference with the systems of Deutsche Telekom. He was found carrying 10,000 US dollars (£7,800) in cash, which was part of what he had been paid for his work against Lonestar.
A mobile phone was also seized which contained a “Mirai monitor” that showed Kaye’s code connecting to hundreds of thousands of devices. Kaye was convicted in Germany for attempted computer sabotage and was given a one-year and eight months sentence, suspended for three years
