Booter Owner Pleads Guilty in Federal Court

Sergiy P. Usatyuk, who owned a series of services that collectively launched millions of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, has pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of conspiracy to cause damage to Internet-connected computers. The services he owned and offered for use included ExoStress.in ("ExoStresser"), QuezStresser.com, Betabooter.com ("Betabooter"), Databooter.com, Instabooter.com, Polystress.com, and Zstress.net.

The sites were booter services, a class of publicly available, Web-based services that allow cybercriminals to launch DDoS attacks, often for low fees paid by customers who sign up via Web browser and online payment.

According to court documents, Usatyuk ran the network between August 2015 and November 2017. In September 2017, the ExoStresser website advertised that " ... its booter service alone had launched 1,367,610 DDoS attacks, and caused targeted victim computer systems to suffer 109,186.4 hours of network downtime," one of the documents shows.

No date for sentencing was announced.

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