A United States naturalized citizen received the maximum sentence for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on multiple media, bloggers, and legal news aggregation websites.
The man, born Kamyar Jahanrakhshan in Iran, changed his name to Andrew Rakhshan when he became a U.S. citizen. In February this year, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer fraud, the U.S. Department of Justice reveals.
Rakhshan was sentenced to five years in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $520,000 in restitution. The maximum sentence he could receive was statutorily limited at 60 months incarceration as part of the accepted plea agreement.
He admitted to conspiring to launch a DDoS attack in January 2015, targeting Leagle.com, a legal aggregation site that had published information about Rakhshan’s prior criminal conviction in Canada, and which was hosted by a provider located in Dallas, Texas.
The defendant was arrested in July 2017 and charged the next month. In March 2018, a “federal jury voted to convict Mr. Rakhshan of knowingly causing the transmission of a command to a protected computer, an offense that carried a 10 year maximum prison term,” DoJ explains.
A motion for a new trial was granted in July 2018, and the original indictment was superseded in April 2019, when a conspiracy charge was added. Rakhshan pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge and received the statutory maximum sentence for his guilty plea (absent the statutory maximum, the sentence would have been higher).
The defendant attacked multiple websites following a similar pattern: he would first contact them requesting the removal of information about his 2013 criminal conviction in Canada, claiming that it was a similarity in name that was ruining his life. Upon refusal, he first offered bribes, then threatened with attacks targeting the we ..
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