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Romanian WoW player sentenced to a year in prison for 2010 DDOS attacks

wow ddos attack 2010

In 2010, a Romanian World of Warcraft player launched a series of distributed denial of service attacks against the games European servers. This week, he was sentenced to a year in US federal prison for his role in those attacks.

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38-year-old Calin Mateias was indicted for this case in 2011, and on November 20 last year was extradited from Romania and has been held in custody since. According to a release from the US Department of Justice (by way of BBC), in February Mateias pleaded guilty to one count of “intentional damage to a protected computer.” The DDOS attacks in question happened between February and September of 2010, often in connection with “in-game disputes” between Mateias and other players.

Mateias was indicted on unrelated charges back in 2004 for allegedly conspiring to steal over $10 million worth of equipment from California computer supplier Ingram Micro. His screen name at the time was noted as “Dr. Mengele,” a Nazi doctor known for performing human experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Charges in the 2004 robbery attempt were dropped after Mateias’ sentence in the WoW DDOS case, which came about due to an FBI investigation.