UK hacker Adam Mudd jailed for two years for setting up computer hacking business

20-year old UK hacker Adam Mudd has been sentenced to two years in prison for setting up a massive global computer hacking business as a teenager, that was used to carry out 1.7 million cyberattacks.

Mudd was just 16 when he developed the Titanium Stress programme in September 2013 - a distributed denial of service (DDoS) software that could cripple and crash websites by flooding a company's network with fake traffic.

Mudd who used a fake name and address in Manchester, to create the software used it to carry out attacks on several websites including those of Microsoft, Sony, Xbox Live and Cambridge University.

He pleaded guilty to three offences under the UK Computer Misuse Act and a count of money laundering related to the ill-gotten financial gains he made in the process. Mudd was arrested in March 2015, and sentenced to two years in a young offenders' institution at the Old Bailey.

The Guardian reported that he apparently showed no emotion when sentenced.

Mudd went on to make more than £386,000 worth of US dollars and Bitcoins by selling the programme to cybercriminals across the globe from his bedroom in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire. The malware had 112,000 registered users who attacked 666,000 IP addresses around the world, of which, around 53,000 were in the UK alone.

His software helped hackers carry out 1.7 million attacks against more than 650,000 victims.

Among the victims were Xbox Live users, and players of the computer games Minecraft and Runescape which was targeted 25,000 times. The company spent nearly £6million attempting to protect themselves from hackers in the last four years.

He used the username 'themuddfamily', to carry out nearly 600 attacks himself against 181 victims and one 2014 attack on West Hertfordshire College, where he studied, was so large it might have hit 70 nearby schools and universities, including the University of Cambridge.