A World of Warcraft player has now been sentenced to a year in prison after launching a cyberattack that interfered with Blizzard Entertainment’s servers.
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The 38-year-old Romanian World of Warcraft player named Calin Mateias was responsible for a DDoS attack that affected Blizzard’s servers back in 2010 and resulted in thousands of players being kicked off the multiplayer game. According to the Department of Justice’s press release that detailed why Mateias engaged in the cyberattack and the reason why legal action was being taken against him, it appears that the player’s beef was with rival players, not Blizzard itself.
“Mateias, using his in-game avatar, often participated in collaborative events, such as ‘raids,’ where players joined forces to meet game objectives and were rewarded with virtual proceeds or in-game advantages,” the Department of Justice press release read. “Mateias became involved in disputes with other players for a variety of reasons, including the division of loot and membership in raid teams.
“Between February and September 2010, typically in connection with in-game disputes with other players, Mateias launched DDoS attacks on World of Warcraft servers in Europe. A DDoS attack is an attack on a computer network in which multiple computers are used to transmit a flood of superfluous requests to the target network, thereby overloading it, and making it unavailable to other users. Mateias’ DDoS attacks caused World of Warcraft servers to crash and prevented some paying customers from accessing the game.”
Mateias was indicted in this case back in 2011, the year after he launched the attack, and was extradited from Romania just last year. He’s been in custody in the United States since November 20 and plead guilty in February to the charge of intentional damage to a protected computer.
In addition to spending one year in prison for the charges levied against him by Blizzard, Mateias also had to pay damages in restitution to Blizzard for the efforts that were required by the company to repel his attacks. Mateias was ordered to pay a fine of $29,987 along with the year being spent in prison. By the time he’s released, he’ll actually have been imprisoned for longer than just a year though. Mateias has been held in federal lockup for the past six months since he was extradited to the States and did not receive any leniency when taking that time spent here into account.
