Xbox Live hacker sentenced to 2 years in jail

Adam Mudd, the man who created the program responsible for at least 1.7 million attacks on Xbox Live, Minecraft’s servers, Microsoft, and other online services has been sentences to two years in prison as reported by The Guardian.

According to the report, Mudd, who is 20 years old now, earned over £386,000 in US dollars and bitcoins in sales of his program and that there were “more than 112,000 registered users of Mudd’s program who hacked about 666,000 IP addresses. Of those, nearly 53,000 were in the UK.”

The report states that Mudd had been suffering from “undiagnosed Asperger syndrome” but that he was also described as being “bright and high-functioning” by his lawyer with the judge, Michael Topolski QC, concluding that Mudd knew exactly what he was doing and the consequences his actions would have on business and security. “I’m entirely satisfied that you knew full well and understood completely this was not a game for fun,” Topolshi said. “It was a serious money-making business and your software was doing exactly what you created it to do.” Mudd was also accused of personally carrying out at least 594 of the distributed denial of service attacks between December 2013 and March 2015. He pleaded guilty.

Do you think two years is sufficient punishment? What do you think could have been done to prevent this situation? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.