An Indian origin man named Paras Jha, 22, of New Jersey has been asked to pay $8.6 million as the penalty for launching cyber attacks on a leading US University. The sentence was pronounced by Trenton Federal Court Judge Michael Shipp who asked the individual to serve 6 months House Arrest in addition to the pronounced monetary penalty.
Paras Jha is accused of launching cyber attacks on a leading US University by creating click to fraud botnets, infecting thousands of IoT devices with malicious software.
After the house confinement, Jha is also said to do 2,500 hours of community service under a federal officer’s supervision.
Scribes reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the case on Jha was filed in Nov’14 and latter a series of similar cases were filed against him in different district courts of US till September 2016.
The cases filed accused Paras for launching distributed denial of service attacks on the computer network of New Jersey-based Rutgers University disrupting the central server for weeks. As a result of the shutdown, the staff, faculty, student work of delivering assignments and assessments was severely impacted.
NOTE 1- Paras Jha was also accused by the district court of Alaska for co-working with Josiah White, 21, of Pennsylvania and Dalton Norman, 22, of Louisiana for creating Mirai Botnet. Eventually, all the three accused were collectively found guilty of compromising more than 100,000 US-based connected devices such as home routers with malicious software.
NOTE 2- In September’18 all the three were separately sentenced by the federal court in Alaska to serve a 5- year period of probation; 2,500 hours of community service and were ordered to pay a penalty of $127,000 along with the cryptocurrency they made by launching cyber attacks.
