Extortionist Arrested In US For Hitting Sites With DDoS Attacks

Authorities in the United States arrested a man last week who has been charged with launching distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks and making threats against a number of major targets.

The man in custody is Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, an Iranian-born man who launched a number of attacks designed to interrupt the service and threaten the operations of a number of new publications and websites including Leagle.com, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and Metro News Canada.

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Jahanrakhshan was granted U.S. citizenship in 1991 before becoming a permanent resident of Canada in 1995 before being deported back to the U.S. in 2014 after criminal cases of theft in 2005 and fraud in 2011.

After his deportation back to the U.S., Jahanrakhshan began contacting website that published stories about his past criminal records. In emails obtained by Bleeping Computer, Jahanrakhshan can be seen posing as a member of the hacking group Anonymous and making threats against the publications.

The email, sent to Leagle.com, claimed that if the site didn’t remove a document involving one of Jahanrakhshan’s cases then the site would be targeted by a DDoS attack that would result in visitors being unable to access the site.

Jahanrakhshan made good on the threat when Leagle.com refused to remove the file—and declined a $100 bribe to remove the file—and launched a sustained DDoS attack that adversely affected the website’s servers. Because Leagle.com was not able to deal with the attack, it removed the file and Jahanrakhshan ended the attack.

Read: DDoS Attack On Gaming, Gambling Sites In Hong Kong Believed To Be Extortion Attempt

After successfully forcing Leagle.com into removing a file mentioning his name, Jahanrakhshan moved onto other targets including new organizations in Australia and Canada as well as the official website of the Canadian government.

Jahanrakhshan also extended his threats to customers advertising on the CBC and Canada.com in an attempt to encourage those companies to push the sites to remove any mention of Jahanrakhshan and his past criminal record. The articles included references to how Jahanrakhshan used fake credit cards to buy luxury cars and a boat.

When those DDoS attacks failed to produce the same result as the one against Leagle.com, Jahanrakhshan opted to instead call in bomb threats at the offices of the news publications and government agencies and make death threats against family members of employees of the organizations.

Jahanrakhshan’s efforts were finally put to a halt when he was arrested last week. Law enforcement in the U.S. was able to link the Yahoo email address used to send threats to organizations to Jahanrakhshan.

The suspected attacker could face up to five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines if found guilty.

Jahanrakhshan is just the latest DDoS attacker to be caught by law enforcement. Earlier this month, a man who used the alias BestBuy was arrested and confessed to his role in using a botnet-powered DDoS attack to disrupt services for more than one million Deutsche Telekom customers.