Federal prosecutors in the U.S. have charged Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27, with running a DDoS botnet that conducted a record 35,000 attacks in a year, including targeting Microsoft's services
The attacks targeted critical infrastructure, corporate networks, and government agencies globally, causing over $10 million in damages to U.S. victims. The brothers face charges of conspiracy to damage protected computers, with Ahmed Salah facing a maximum sentence of life in prison and Alaa Salah facing up to 5 years. The tool used for the attacks, called Distributed Cloud Attack Tool (DCAT), was dismantled following their arrest as part of Operation PowerOFF, an international effort to dismantle criminal DDoS-for-hire services. The brothers' group, Anonymous Sudan, initially portrayed as a hacktivist group, was actually a digital mercenary crew collaborating with other hacktivist groups and offering DDoS services for a fee. The tools used for the attacks were marketed in the criminal underground under names like Godzilla, Skynet, and InfraShutdown. ```https://thehackernews.com/2024/10/us-charges-two-sudanese-brothers-for.html