Garrett M. Graff reports:
The three college-age defendants behind the creation of the Mirai botnet—an online tool that wreaked destruction across the internet in the fall of 2016 with unprecedentedly powerful distributed denial of service attacks—will stand in an Alaska courtroom Tuesday and ask for a novel ruling from a federal judge: They hope to be sentenced to work for the FBI.
Josiah White, Paras Jha, and Dalton Norman, who were all between 18 and 20 years old when they built and launched Mirai, pleaded guilty last December to creating the malware that hijacked hundreds of thousands of Internet of Things devices, uniting them as a digital army that began as a way to attack rival Minecraft video game hosts, and evolved into an online tsunami of nefarious traffic that knocked entire web hosting companies offline. At the time, the attacks raised fears amid the presidential election targeted online by Russia that an unknown adversary was preparing to lay waste to the internet.
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