Titanium Stresser developer pleads guilty; responsible for 1.7 million DDoS attacks

A 19-year-old man accused of creating Titanium Stresser has pleaded guilty to money laundering and computer misuse, and will be sentenced in December.

UK-based Adam Mudd allegedly wrote the code when he was 15 for Titanium Stresser, a tool that coordinated DDoS attacks around the world and brought the hacker an income of over $385,000. Between December 2013 and March 2015 when Mudd was arrested, the cheap and popular for-hire tool allegedly launched 592 DDoS attacks against 181 IP addresses. However the logs authorities discovered in his home meticulously recorded 1.7 million attacks, also by other criminals who had rented the service, according to prosecutor Jonathan Polnay.

“Titanium Stresser is a computer program created by the defendant, and it is not an unimpressive piece of software in terms of design,” prosecutor Jonathan Polnay told the court. “It carried out DDoS attacks and it takes down computer networks and websites.”

When asked about the case, Detective inspector Marin Peters of the cybercrime unit said the “case is a regrettable one, because this young man clearly has a lot of skill, but he has been utilizing that talent for personal gain at the expense of others.” The police don”t want to “unnecessarily criminalize young people, but want to harness those skills before they accelerate into crime.”

Specialists believe the code behind Titanium Stresser may have inspired hacker group The Lizard Squad to develop LizardStresser, a DDoS-for-hire tool responsible for the shutdown of gaming networks Playstation and Xbox Live in 2014. The six teenagers were arrested this year.