Sean Krishanmakoto Sharma, Indian-origin computer science student was arrested after a multinational operation to crackdown on the young hackers who has been charged with, carrying out cyber-attacks on chat sites.
He was produced before the federal Magistrate Judge Alka Sagar in Los Angeles and was released on a $100,000 bail bond, said Brian Stretch, the federal prosecutor for Northern California.
“Sharma had used a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) tool to disrupt the computers of a San Francisco company that provides chat services to other companies between November 2014 and January 2015,” Stretch said in a statement.
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Judge Sagar, before whom Sharma appeared, became in 2013 is the first Indian American woman to be appointed a federal judge.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has identified him as a 26-year-old graduate student from the University of Southern California in Los Angele.
Steven Wilson, the head of EC3, said that many computer enthusiasts are getting involved in the “low-level fringe cyber crime” without being aware of the consequences.
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“One of the key priorities of law enforcement should be to engage with these young people to prevent them from pursuing a criminal path, helping them understand how they can use their skills for a more constructive purpose,” he said.
DDoS is a form of cyber-attack that floods the computers with bogus requests which will overwhelm and paralyse the computers. DDoS uses many viruses and programs that are known as botnets, because they robotically transmit disruptive requests to the servers and trojans, which are secretly implanted in other people’s computers to carry out attacks.
A court document said that Sharma used a botnet called Xtreme Fire to carry out the attacks.
By Premji
