Spiderman sentenced to prison over Germany cyberattacks

A 29-year old British hacker who confessed to committing a cyber attack last November which temporarily took down Internet access for nearly 1 million German consumers has been sentenced by a German court, according to news reports.

The 29-year old hacker, who used the online alias "Spiderman", among other names, also faces criminal charges in Britain, where authorities have requested his extradition.

The attack caused internet outages for about 4.5 percent of Deutsche Telekom's 20 million fixed-line customers.

"One can't say exactly what the damages for Telekom are," the presiding judge, Christof Wuttke, said in handing down the sentence, noting the costs to Germany's biggest telecom services operator were sizable, but not "lasting".

The court calculated Deutsche Telekom spent around 1 million euros ($1.2 million), mainly for setting up a national hotline for customer complaints and for weekend overtime pay for security staff.

The regional court in Cologne handed the man, named only as Daniel K., a suspended sentence of one year and eight months for attempted commercial computer sabotage. The maximum sentence was up to 10 years, and prosecutors had asked for two years.

Telekom estimated damages of 2 million euros (1.8 million pounds). A spokeswoman said the company was considering a civil lawsuit. "We will await the written judgment and weigh if we should go with a civil case," spokeswoman Alexia Sailer said.

During last November, Daniel K. had used a variant of the malicious Mirai botnet code to attack internet routers and turn them into remotely controlled “bots” for mounting large-scale attacks which disrupted websites and computer systems, police stated.

The botnet spread across the globe, laying internet router equipment useless for up to a dozen telecom operators around the world, with Germany’s Deutsche Telekom the hardest hit.

British police arrested the hacker in February at Luton airport, north of London, acting upon a request from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) to charge him with selling his botnet to online criminals. He was the sent to germany on trial.

The malicious code had exploited unprotected ports which allow network technicians to fix customers’ routers from afar, but can also expose the equipment to outside attack. Both the attack and rapid recovery from it exploited this feature.