Hacker Sentenced To Federal Prison For Attacks On 'World Of Warcraft' Servers

A hacker was sentenced on Monday to a year in federal prison for disrupting one of the most popular video games of all time, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in a press release. A 38-year-old Romanian national named Calin Mateias had been in custody since November for coordinating a series of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks in “World of Warcraft” seven years earlier.

Mateis was extradited from Romania last year and pleaded guilty to a charge of intentional damage to a protected computer, according to the Justice Department. His crime was deliberately slowing down or even shutting down “World of Warcraft” servers earlier this decade out of spite for other players of the massive online game.

A DDoS attack is when a hacker overloads a server with traffic to cause a logjam for anyone trying to access it, according to Scientific American. Noted for its relative simplicity, hackers occasionally resort to DDoS attacks against games or websites as a prank.

Mateias was charged with doing this to the European servers for “World of Warcraft” from February to September 2010. The DOJ claimed he coordinated these attacks after spats with other “World of Warcraft” players over things as small as which players got which loot after doing quests.

His efforts disrupted not only his online rivals but potentially thousands of others who wanted to play the game. Mateias had previously been implicated in 2004 on a conspiracy to steal millions of dollars in computer equipment from tech distributor Ingram Micro, the BBC noted.

The DOJ report from that case said Mateias went by “Dr Mengele” on the internet at the time, as a reference to the infamous Nazi war criminal of the same name. Those charges were dropped after Mateias was sentenced for the “World of Warcraft” attacks.

Originally launched in 2004, “World of Warcraft” continues to enjoy strong revenue for developer Blizzard Entertainment. Its next expansion pack, “Battle for Azeroth,” will launch in August.