A man accused of running cyber attack-for-hire service Titanium Stresser has pleaded guilty to multiples charges in relation to his ownership and use of the service.

Nineteen-year-old Adam Mudd from Kings Langley, a town north of London in the United Kingdom, pleaded guilty to unauthorized acts with intent to impair the operation of a computer, a charge of making, supplying or offering to supply the Titanium Stresser service, which helps orchestrate Distributed Denial of Service attacks, and concealing criminal property.

Mudd is alleged to have built the Titanium Stresser when he was 15, and then using the service himself to launch 594 DDoS attacks against 181 IP addresses between December 2013 and March 2015, the month Mudd was arrested and the service shut down.

Mudd kept detailed logs of all attacks the service had been used for, allowing investigators to discover that it had been used for 1.7 million DDoS attacks, making it for a time the most popular DDoS for-hire service online.

The Eastern Region Special Operations Unit, a police special task force, estimated that Mudd had earned $385,000 during his time running the service in fees charged to rent the service to others to undertake their own DDoS attacks.

“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. The defendant charged for use of it, to others all around the world – these offenses truly had a global reach – would pay money to use this program.”

Polnay said there were 1.7 million attacks, taking down websites and computers around the world, “no doubt causing considerable damage and loss to others.”

Lizard Squad

While not a member of Lizard Squad, Mudd could be called an inspiration for the group, since it’s said to have used Mudd’s code to build its infamous Lizard Stresser, the DDoS-for-hire service that most famously brought down both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live in December 2014.

It’s not clear at this stage how much jail time Mudd may be facing. The judge who accepted the guilty plea did note that “a spell in a youth offenders institution will be considered” when the sentence hearing takes place in December.

Image: Privacy Canada