In addition, revenue was generated by selling ads for other booter services on the sites. Hiring a DDoS may cost relatively little, but the sheer number of website-clogging attacks initiated (over 3.8 million in the first 13 months of the criminal scheme) meant that significant sums of money were being earnt by Usatyuk and his accomplice. Low cost has made booter-based DDoS attack services offer an easy entry point for those tempted by a life as a cybercriminal. That attack is said to have not only disrupted the school district’s computer system, but also impacted the systems of 17 other organisations that shared the same IT infrastructure, including other school districts, the county government, and a Catholic Diocese in the area. In one attack, highlighted by the Department of Justice, a subscriber to the Betabooter service launched a series of DDoS attacks against a school district in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Despite their different names, the “booter” (sometimes known as “stressser”) services were all designed for the same purpose – to make it simple for cybercriminals to hire a DDoS attacks that could swamp a targeted web server or computer with unwanted internet traffic, interrupting normal business operations and causing network downtime.
