17-year-old Arrested for Attacking CoD Servers

I guess it's good my younger bro sold his copy of Black Ops for PS3 this week. He sold it because he was complaining about all the campers.

In my day I have hosted many game servers and clan websites. I have had hours of work destroyed by hackers. I lost graphics and databases that had been compiled over the years. It taught me to learn better back-up methods, but still, I was a victim of an upset gamer. Hackers in general just like the challenge of cracking things. Malicious attacks that affect hundreds, in my case thousands, of people are just wrong. I hate to point the finger at teenagers, but they are the ones I find the most issues with. In clans I have run, they are the ones that find the cheats first and use them to gain advantages in online gameplay. Most cheats just cause the server to run slower. Ultimately shutting down the server.

It sucks to see such a young kid getting put in jail. But who is going to protect the people that want to run their sites and servers without hackers bringing it down. Most people just want a fun place to play and a FAIR place to play.

I think it's time to start kicking up penalties for all kinds of computer and network crimes. The No 1 reason so many jerks behave like thieves, saboteurs and terrorists online is that they can expect to get away with it. Even if they get caught. The courts made that point almost from the start. With a more serious view on these crimes, which they deserve, it will also pave the way for tracing and apprehending these scums.

So is this possibly going to be the first time for someone being jailed for cheating in a online game? Granted the charges aren't because he cheated but rather the method he used to do such. But it was the motive behind it.

Hacking and disrupting game servers like that should fall under one charge: Destruction of property. A business like those behind Call of Duty Black Ops are the owners of this property. Just because its a game, and just because its a big corporation, doesn't mean it hasn't harmed the business. In my eyes, really no different just because its not something tangible. Such people really need to learn some respect.

Why would you want to increase policing? Companies like Aiplex are DDoSing our favorite websites and you want to sit back and let us become ever more powerless!

Hmmmm CoDing in the real world is harmful to ones sleep...... I guess....

People who cheat in online gaming are scum. For the life of me I can't understand how this gives them any source of accomplishment knowing it's a hollow victory. Do like singapore and beat the holy crap out of them with a cane in public, charge pay per view for other countries to watch and use the money to fight cancer. I like to call it "Going Green" with hackers lol. Remember every little bit helps....

UK's gone to shit. The police bowing to the beck and call of corporations like that. Yeah cheaters are scum and whatever, we all hate them.Obviously all sense of reason went out the window here though.

I'm getting more and more scared living in the UK, with moves like this from our police something as simple as a buggy browser update could land us in court. Its insane.

i dislike campers

He hacks a game server whats to stop him hacking any other serve? If he gets away with it once he will do it again and again and who knows if the people who catch him down the line will be forgiving. Yes CoD is a stupid game but he has the potential to gain access to sensitive data. Stamp it out now while he's young and show him that that sort of behaviour is unacceptable.
BTW what the hell are you talking about being scared to live in the uk? Your scared because the police actually enforced a law and just because it was in favour of a corporation?? Wise up wee lad! You sound like a daily Mail reader.....

If CoD's network admionistrators/operators can't simply track and ban all the cheating accounts thus preventing them from creating new accounts through network block for hours/days that means they're not skilled at all and then their network is prone to hacking... even by teenagers.

a lot of hackers dont actually break into websites and do this to online games

i use programs and tinker with the games in ofline mode just to see what can be done to it, but i would never do it to an online game becasue it would ruin other peoples experience

this is one of those cases where im glad they perminant ban people becasue it is just wrong for them to cheat there way to the top like the goverment

becasue lets face it most poloticians are corrupt, power corrupts even churchill was suscpectible to bribes

This truly is a bad way to go about things. I wish a better way exsisted but I don't think there is.

too bad for the kid though this was coming to him i wonder if he'd be downloading torrents at the time more trouble...

I hear it is designed for the kiddie consoles anyway, multi player maps are small and all that nonsense. I will stick with BF2 on my gaming rig.

He didn't really hack a server, he ran a program, he's a script kiddie, not a hacker. I would speculate that since he had to run a program specific to CoD, what's to stop him from doing it on any other server is a complete lack of knowledge. There is no evidence that he had any access to any sensitive data. All that said, I agree with you, in principle, he should be punished to learn doing whatever you want to get what you want isn't ok; including hacking. At the same time, I've read the Computer Misuse Act, and it's a terrible terrible piece of legislation designed to take certain freedoms away from the UK's citizenry and hand it to government. As, for the corporation winning, they're within their rights having him arrested, I don't think they should prosecute though, just scare him good.

The UK is in complete shambles. DoS attack gets you arrested but carry a knife and you get a warning...WTF??!!!

I hate cheaters! However, sending a 17-year old in court for such thing is just insane! He is not a hacker, just a cheater. Suspend his steam account that's all the punishment he deserves, it will teach him that if he can't play a game fair then he is not going to play it. Our govermental system loves to waste time on stupid stuff like that, while murderers and rapists just walk the earth. Makers of CoD are some greedy bastards, besides making me pay $60 for something that's worth about $30, tomorrow they will probably arrest me for this comment.

LOL Instead of PunkBuster getting him, the cops show up at his door.

This isn't a harmless little cheat we're speaking of, he actually made a denial of service attack on a server. No matter what was the point behind it, it's a serious offense which should definitely not go unpunished.

What annoys me is that the police reacts with such timely haste when Activision calls in, but if an independent host was the victim of attacks (I've known many whose work has been ruined by idiot teenagers with a few scripts), the police would just tell him/her to piss off.

Hmm... rather than putting him in jail, since he destroyed someone's property, they should take his system, tie him to a chair, and force him to watch while they go at it with a sledgehammer! Just desserts!

maybe he was just pissed off at the crap product that Treyarch published...

At least he isn't American. He would've been shipped to Guantanamo with no trial for cyber terrorism.

KIDs allways make our life S*** in online games,i ve tasted in cod 4 /mw2 and other games

online gaming cheaters suck, wimps, etc.

Put them all in jail...

God forbid the police go after murderers and thieves. The cops don't even need to put down their donuts while going after kids playing a video game.

I want Lou to go to hackers/scripters houses with a baseball bat and just hit them a couple of times in the knees. That is all that is needed for them to not want to do it again.

you do realise that if you call the police you need to make things sound a lot worse than they are

when i got assalted i called police and got them done for intent of corsing gbh (greivous bodily harm)

they have to react tothat and there is no way to prove if it is real or not so they have to come amediatly

Given the current state of (limited) technology implementation, harsh penalties are probably the only reasonable method of deterrence. However, I can't help but think that blaming a toddler because he knocked your house of cards down is an enlightened stance to take. The ability to create a DDoS-proof infrastructure exists, and considering the costs of not doing so, it is pure laziness/incompetence to prop-up the current infrastructure with outmoded technology that can easily be broken by someone more nefarious than a 17 year old.

The ultimate punkbuster