Minecraft cyber hacker Adam Mudd must pay back £70k

Adam Mudd pleaded guilty to computer offences at an earlier hearing

A computer hacker jailed for masterminding global online attacks as a teenager from his bedroom must pay back nearly £70,000 or face another two years behind bars.

Adam Mudd, now 21, admitted creating malware in 2013 which was used to carry out 1.7 million cyber attacks and was jailed for two years in 2017.

Mudd, from Hertfordshire, had benefited by £171,000, the Old Bailey heard

Judge Michael Topolski QC ordered he pay back £69,629 within three months.

The court heard most of the money was in a PayPal account in Luxembourg.

Mudd, from Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, who has autism, was 16-years-old when he created his Titanium Stresser program, which was used to carry out the attacks on gaming application Xbox Live and the games Minecraft and Runescape.

Companies 'paid millions'

The attacks, known as "distributed denials of service", left companies paying millions to defend themselves against it.

At his trial, the Old Bailey heard he earned more than £386,000 worth of US dollars and Bitcoins from selling the programme to international cyber criminals.

There were more than 112,000 registered users of his program who hacked some 666,000 IP addresses, nearly 53,000 of which were in the UK.

The court heard he personally carried out 594 attacks between December 2013 and March 2015, including one on West Herts College where he was studying computer science.

Mudd targeted up to 70 schools and colleges, including the University of Cambridge, University of Essex and University of East Anglia, as well as local councils.

He had pleaded guilty to one count of doing unauthorised acts with intent to impair the operation of computers, one count of making, supplying or offering to supply an article for use in an offence contrary to the Computer Misuse Act, and one count of concealing criminal property.

The court heard that Mudd, who lived at home with his parents, had previously undiagnosed Asperger syndrome and was more interested in "status" in the online gaming community than the money.