Competition By Zombified Denial Of Service Attacks

from the one-way-to-do-it... dept

There are all sorts of ways to compete online, and plenty of them are underhanded. Still, it seems a bit extreme to hire someone to do a distributed denial of service attack on all of your competitors -- but that's exactly what it appears one teenaged e-commerce store owner apparently did. He even paid off the kid he hired to carry out the deed with free sporting goods merchandise from his online store. What's unclear, however, is how the two got caught -- which is the really interesting question here. We keep hearing stories about how difficult it is to track down DDoS perpetrators, and yet, it gets no mention at all in the article. This means that it was either pure luck (i.e., someone talked) or the FBI doesn't want to reveal the info as (hopefully) they're using similar methods to track down others.