According to British security firm Sophos, 26-year-old Santiago Garrido spread a computer worm to take control of computers and launch denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, affecting one-third of Internet users in Spain.
This incident occurred in 2003 after Garrido was expelled from the IRC Hispano chat room for violating rules. The attack impacted approximately 3 million customers of service providers such as Wanada, ONO, and Lleida Net in Spain at the time.
In addition to serving a prison sentence, the hacker, known by the aliases Ronnie and Mike25, was ordered by the La Coruña regional court to pay damages amounting to $1.5 million.
“Many hackers have been using DDoS tactics to extort websites. In this case, Garrido’s motive was purely revenge, fueled by his anger over being ostracized in the chatroom,” remarked Graham Cluley, a security advisor at Sophos.
According to a statistic from Sophos, over 60% of today’s spam originates from zombies (computers infected with worms and controlled by hackers), including PCs belonging to legitimate organizations. This not only harms the reputation of the company but also results in their emails being blocked across various other systems.
