Christopher Michael Sudlik, 22, of St. Louis, Missouri, was sentenced to 36 months’ probation, 60 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $110,932.71 in restitution. The sentence was announced yesterday by James L. Santelle, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
Sudlik had previously pled guilty for participating in #OpWisconsin with other members of “Anonymous” in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the Angel Soft bathroom tissue website in February and March of 2011. Angel Soft is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the intended target of the attack.
Sudlik and others utilized a “low orbit ion cannon” (LOIC) designed to flood the Angel Soft server with traffic with the intention of disrupting the website’s service. Those participating in the attack often did not know that it would be easy to track their IP and thought their participation would really be anonymous.
The Angel Soft server is located in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Koch Industries suffered several hundred-thousand dollars in loss as a result of the continuous attacks on several of its network servers over a three day span.
In sentencing the defendant, Judge Griesbach noted the “serious nature of the offense” and decried Sudlik’s “arrogance” for believing that his political beliefs were necessarily superior to those with whom he disagreed. The judge admonished the defendant for “crossing the line” from appropriate political speech to an illegal and costly cyber-attack.
Sudlik’s sentence seems similar to what another judge in Kansas imposed on Eric J. Rosol for his role in a similar attack on another Koch server in #OpWisconsin: kochind.com. Rosol was sentenced to two years federal probation and ordered to pay $183,000 in restitution for taking part in that DDoS attack.
SOURCE: This report includes material from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Wisconsin