Saturday 21 February 2015
Dennis Collins, last of Anonymous anti-copyright hacktivists sentenced in Virginia.
Dennis Collins aka “Owen” and a dozen others were charged in 2013 with what the Justice Department called a coordinated series of cyber attacks waged by Anonymous. They had targeted the websites of the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America and the United States Copyright Office. The campaign of digital civil disobedience was called “Operation Payback” and was undertaken by upwards of thousands of hacktivists in late 2010.
Attorney Richard D. Green, speaking on behalf of the US government, said at Friday’s hearing that Collins went from being a casual observer to the DDoS campaign to becoming a direct attacker.
“Owen” was an operator on an IRC server where many of the plans were hatched, AnonOps, according to past reports, and in court this week Green called Collins “one of the more involved defendants in the conspiracy.”
Dennis was sentenced to 6 months of home confinement and one year probation. Restitution has yet to be determined but damages claimed to have been as high as 8.7 million dollars. He has yet to face the charges in California for his alleged role in the Paypal 14 case. No one has ever had to prove these damages for a simple DDoS which is nothing short of outrageous.
