Hacker Sentenced To Federal Prison For Attacks On 'World Of Warcraft' Servers

A hacker was sentenced on Monday to a year in federal prison for disrupting one of the most popular video games of all time, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in a press release. A 38-year-old Romanian national named Calin Mateias had been in custody since November for coordinating a series of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks in "World of Warcraft" seven years earlier. Mateis was extradited from Romania last year and pleaded guilty to a charge of intentional damage to a protected computer, according to the Justice Department. His crime was deliberately slowing down or even shutting down "World of Warcraft" servers earlier this decade out of spite for other players of the massive online game. A DDoS attack is when a hacker overloads a server with traffic to cause a logjam for anyone trying to access it, according to Scientific American.