An Ohio student was sentenced to prison after being convicted for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against right-wing websites, including sites administered by Rudy Giuliani, Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly.
Mitchell Frost, a student at the University of Akron, was ordered to pay $50,000 in restitution for the attacks, and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Also targeted in the attacks was a server at the university he attended, which brought the school's network to a screeching halt for over eight hours.
DDoS attacks, usually accomplished by utilizing multiple systems controlled through the use of a botnet, are fairly easy to conduct and generally difficult to trace.
The majority of servers deployed in the public and private sectors are susceptible to such attacks, and preventative measures to thwart DDoS vulnerabilities can be expensive to implement.
The lengthy sentence demonstrates a growing intolerance for disruptive and malicious attacks, and should serve to dissuade similar exploits.
Source: http://dos-attacks.com/2010/11/09/student-who-did-ddos-gets-30-months-in-prison-and-50000-fine/