Illegal Booter Connected with DDoSes Sentenced to Prison, Fine

Sergiy P. Usatyuk, a 21-year-old resident of Orland Park, Ill., has been sentenced to 13 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for his role in running illegal booter services responsible for millions of DDoS attacks. Usatyuk was also ordered to forfeit $542,925 and dozens of servers as part of the sentence.

According to information brought to the trial, from August 2015 through November 2017 Usatyuk and a co-conspirator developed, controlled, and operated a series of booter services and related web sites. The illegal services included ExoStress.in, ("ExoStresser"), QuezStresser.com, Betabooter.com ("Betabooter"), Databooter.com, Instabooter.com, Polystress.com and Zstress.net.

Government prosecutors said that Usatyuk had made hundreds of thousands of dollars running DDoS-for-hire services. The booters and stressers are considered inexpensive ways of forcing a victim's site off the web by overwhelming it with unrequested traffic. In many cases, servers that are not targets but merely share an ISP, hosting service, or address block with the victim are also forced off the web.

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