A 24-year-old Connecticut resident was arrested this week for allegedly working with members of the group Anonymous to launch a cyber attack on the website of KISS frontman Gene Simmons.
Kevin George Poe, AKA “spydr101,” was arrested by FBI agents for allegedly attacking GeneSimmons.com through a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack back in late 2010. The disruption caused at least $5,000 in losses, according to an indictment returned by a federal grand jury. He’s facing up to 15 years in prison.
Why did Simmons draw the ire of Anonymous? The feds don’t specify, but it’s almost certainly because of comments he made about peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. “Make sure there are no incursions,” he told fellow entertainers. “Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don’t let anybody cross that line.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office told the Daily Beast that the feds “evaluated servers and were able to discern an IP address that brought us to him,” calling their techniques “quite sophisticated.”
Members of the loosely affiliated “hacktivist” group have launched attacks on a variety of websites from Paypal to TPM for a wide range of reasons. Lawyers for several of the defendants in federal cases connected to alleged Anonymous DDoS attacks have compared the attacks to digital sit-ins or said it was just like overloading a switchboard.
Poe was released on $10,000 bond on Tuesday after an appearance in federal court in Connecticut and was ordered to appear at a future hearing in Los Angeles.
