Teenage hacker makes £ 400,000 by hacking 1.7 million Xbox Live and Minecraft accounts

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Teenage Hacker named Adam Mudd is said to have made £400,000 by selling a nasty virus to fellow hackers which led to the crash of more than 1.7 million Xbox Live and Minecraft accounts. The young computer hacker is on a verge of facing a jail term for crashing websites and causing immense damage to computer networks through data deluge.

Getting further into the details, the source reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders says that Adam at the age of 16 started developing his own virus which could launch Distributed Denial of Service and eventually crash the websites. The DDoS Software named Titanium Stresser Tool was then sold to many fellow hackers of by Adam and this led to the crash of more than 1.7 million XBox Live and Minecraft accounts.

As soon as Mudd turned 18, he started to sell the malware and made more than £400,000 between September 2013 and March 2015. His financial details revealed by the law enforcement authorities disclose that Adam received a total of £240,153 in pounds and then made 249.81 bitcoins out the deal- worth an overall amount of £386,079. He also used a username called ‘themuddfamily’ and carried out nearly 600 attacks against 181 victims.

One of the victims was the website of the University of Cambridge where made users lose access to the University’s digital contents for weeks. And the September 16th attack of 2014 affected more than 70 schools and higher education establishments.

Mudd launched attacks across US, Brazil, Australia and Europe causing severe financial loss of more than 1 billion pounds.

It was in March 2015 (3rd-4th) that law enforcement agencies in support of FBI and NSA nabbed Adam for launching DDoS attacks through his specially formulated Titanium Stresser malware. Out of the 1.7 million cyber attacks which victimized more than 650,000, over 52,000 were in the UK and most of the victims were users of XBox Live and Players of Runescape and Minecraft.

On an additional note, the young man will also face money laundering charges attached to the same case, as he tried to turn the illegally obtained money into legal by investing and procuring the currency through various streams.

More details will be updated shortly!

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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