Paras Jha is 21 years old.
He's a former computer science student at Rutger's University.
And now, he's facing the possibility of 5 years in jail after admitting he wrote code that created a botnet which harnessed more than 100,000 IoT Devices.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced the guilty plea by Paras and two others earlier today.
“Paras Jha has admitted his responsibility for multiple hacks of the Rutgers University computer system,” said Acting U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick.
“These computer attacks shut down the server used for all communications among faculty, staff and students, including assignment of course work to students, and students’ submission of their work to professors to be graded. The defendant’s actions effectively paralyzed the system for days at a time and maliciously disrupted the educational process for tens of thousands of Rutgers’ students. Today, the defendant has admitted his role in this criminal offense and will face the legal consequences for it.”
And, the court documents say, Jha shared his malware with the world, which expanded its impact. "The defendants’ involvement with the original Mirai variant ended in the fall of 2016, when Jha posted the source code for Mirai on a criminal forum. Since then, other criminal actors have used Mirai variants in a variety of other attacks."
Two other young men, Josiah White, 20, of Washington, Pennsylvania; and Dalton Norman, 21, of Metairie, Louisiana, pleaded guilty to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse act.
You can read the Mirai Botnet court documents, if you'd like to learn more about the creator of the DDoS attack and their other activities, including clickfraud.
