Cyber vigilante arrested for DDOS attacks on news sites
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Federal authorities have charged Bruce Raisley, of Monaca, Pennsylvania, in connection with a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on news websites hosting articles that detailed embarrassing facts about his online relationship with a man pretending to be a woman.
Raisley allegedly used a botnet - a collection of compromised PCs - to launch the DDOS attacks to overwhelm the websites with traffic in order to shut them down.
According to the criminal complaint filed in the New Jersey U.S. district court, Raisley targeted specific pages at websites including rollingstone.com and radar.com that hosted one of two articles about his falling out with the cyber vigilante group Perverted Justice, which works to identify sexual predators.
The article allegedly targeted by Raisley - called To Catch a Predator: The New American Witch Hunt, which originally appeared in Rolling Stone - reported that Raisley had a falling out with the leaders of Perverted Justice, who sought revenge against him for criticizing their tactics. To pay him back, one man allegedly pretended to be a woman online and lured Raisley into a relationship to embarrass him.
The complaint, with signed testimony by FBI special agent Susan Secco, said one of the compromised computers used by the botnet to launch the attacks belonged to a Slovenian network security group that tracked the malware back to Raisley's IP address.
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