Iranian-born U.S. citizen Andrew Rakhshan, previously convicted in Canada for fraud, was sentenced to the maximum sentence of five years and ordered to pay over $500,000 after being found guilty of launching several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against news websites.
Rakhshan, born Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, was arrested in July 2017 and indicted one month later (1, 2), after being deported from Canada.
He then pled guilty in February 2020 of conspiring to launch DDoS attacks legal aggregation site Leagle.com in January 2015 after the website refused to take down court documents with information on his prior conviction in Canada.
Anonymous used as a cover
According to the criminal complaint, he extorted other websites threatening to take them down, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Sidney Morning Herald, Canada's Metro News, and the official website of the Government of Canada (canada.ca) whose editors named Rakhshan a "sophisticated international fraudster."
Leagle and Fairfax Media were threatened by the defendant posing as a hacktivist group named "Anonymous Hackers" and saying that "more severe attacks will hit your website in the coming days and weeks" until the articles referring to Rakhshan were taken down.
"Mr. Rakhshan purchased services from various booter services, such as ItsFluffy and RageBooter, to deploy the DDoS attack," a Department of Justice press release says.
"The services offered by Rakhshan’s coconspirators allowed Mr. Rakhshan to flood the websites with traffic, overwhelming the servers and disabling the ..
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