Hopeful Anonymous Hacker Teen Shuts Down 444 School Sites with DDoS Attack

Japanese police have brought charges against a 16-year-old teen that is responsible for bringing down 444 school sites in a DDoS attack on the Osaka Board of Education's web server.

With inspirations to be a member of the famous Anonymous hacker group, a 16-year-old teen has sought to get revenge on professors at his school by orchestrating a targeted DDoS attack on the Osaka school's web server that ultimately brought down 444 school sites.

The teen responsible for that attack, which remains to be unnamed due being a minor, told police that he only wanted his own school's website to be taken down. Unfortunately, during the DDoS attack on his school's website, which was a server that controlled over 400 other schools in the region, the teen was able to bring them all down by mistake.

DDoS attacks, or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, are known to be instances where a web server is targeted and flooded with an abundance of web traffic that it eventually crashes making all sites hosted on the server to stop loading. In the case of a Japanese teen attacking his school website's server, the kid learned how to perform the attack from books about hacking.

In statements to authorities, the teen admitted to wanting to join the Anonymous hacking group. Sit's possible that the teen's inspiration to be part of the hacktivist group known as Anonymous has motivated him to make the attack on his school due to their disdain of Japan at the government level.

At the time of the attack on the teen's school, he was in junior high school. Now, the teen is in high school and faces up to three years in prison and a fine of up to 500,000 yen, which equates to about $4,500 USD.

The teen has explained to authorities that he did not attempt the attack for a hacktivism campaign; he did it only for personal revenge against his teachers at the time. The teen thought that by bringing the school's site down it would remind the teachers of their own incompetence.

While the teen's attack on his school's website was only to bring one site down, it instead brought down 444 sites in total when he launched several additional attacks after his gratification of accomplishing the takedown of his own school's site. As for the reasons for bringing so many sites down at once, the server receiving the DDoS attack not only hosted the teen's school site but it also hosted other elementary, junior high, and high schools in the Osaka area. In the teen launching additional DDoS attacks on the server it eventually brought other school sites down as well.

As we know all-too-well, the Anonymous hacker group has had more than their fair share of loathing the actions of the Japanese government in many areas, such as the while hunting and mass dolphin slaughters in #OpWhales and #OpKillingBay campaigns. Because of those many detestable actions, we're not surprised to see a teen lash out to inspire to be a member of the Anonymous group.