In 2010, a Romanian man used denial of service attacks to overwhelm World of Warcraft’s European servers, causing them to crash. Now, eight years later, he’s gonna serve time.
The man, 38 year-old Calin Mateias of Romania, was sentenced to one year in a US federal prison yesterday after being extradited last November. He was also ordered to pay Blizzard $29,987 “to compensate the company for labor costs associated with countering the computer attacks.”
According to a release from the Department of Justice, Mateias went after WoW’s servers to exact vengeance against other players over disputes that arose from things like “the division of loot and membership in raid teams.” He made those players—and many others, given that he interfered with entire servers and prevented thousands from logging in—pay for not paying up multiple times between February and September of 2010.
In February, Mateias plead guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, which is defined by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as a computer that’s “used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States.” That led to his sentence yesterday. I don’t imagine he’ll love the division of loot or raid team membership in prison, either.