Virus attack: Rutgers former student sentenced to pay 8.6 million in restitution

Paras Jha, an Indian America former Rutgers student has been sentenced by a federal judge in Trenton to six months of home confinement and payment of $8.6 million in restitution for his role in a computer attack on the University, the Daily Targum reported.
He was also sentenced by U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp to five years of supervised release and 2,500 hours of community service.
Two years ago, Jha conspired with Josiah White of Washington, Pa. and Dalton Norman of Metairie, La. to create the “Mirai botnet,” which shut down websites and internet services around the world between 2014 and 2016, according to an article from NJ Advance Media.
Jha also used his coding skills to specifically target Rutgers University. Under the screen name “exfocus,” Jha taunted the University’s computer security system with tweets such as “where internet go?? 3m dollar gone?” and “The Rutgers infrastructure crumpled like a tin can under the heel of my boot,” according to the article.
The University suffered from disrupted access to web services. This caused the University’s networks to be down for hours or even days, which further led to midterms, final exams and class registration being rescheduled.
Jha later published his code on hacker websites, where others used it in a massive DDoS attack that crashed websites such as Twitter and Netflix in October 2016.
In January 2017, he was identified as the perpetrator of these attacks by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, who spent several months investigating Jha’s identity after his own site was attacked, as reported by the Targum.