Jail for Brit hacker who took down internet of Liberia
LONDON: A British man whose cyberattack took down the internet of Liberia two years ago has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison.
Daniel Kaye, 30, was sentenced to 32 months on Friday after pleading guilty to computer misuse and criminal property possession from late 2016 to early 2017.
The London court heard the self-taught hacker was paid around $30,000 by a rival to disrupt the systems of mobile phone company Lonestar MTN, Liberia’s biggest internet provider.
The so-called distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks overwhelmed its networks and meant its servers couldn’t operate properly, prosecutor Robin Sellers told the court.
The firm spent $600,000 fixing the problem, losing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, he said.
Kaye’s lawyer, Jonathan Green, had argued Lonestar’s estimates of its losses were “unsupported by any evidence”.
“Nobody died, nobody’s life was imperilled, at worst Lonestar customers suffered slow internet speeds,” he argued.
Sentencing Kaye, Judge Alexander Hugh Milne called his actions a “cynical and financially driven attack upon a legitimate business enterprise”.
Kaye, a dual British and Israeli national, was extradited from Germany in August, 2017, under a European Arrest Warrant. That followed a joint investigation by Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and Germany’s federal crime bureau BKA.
The probe initially focussed on interference with the systems of Deutsche Telekom before investigators expanded it when they realised it was part of the Liberian attack.
Kaye was convicted in Germany in July 2017 of attempted computer sabotage and given a 20-month sentence, suspended for three years.