(Image source from: www.theweek.in)

An Indian-origin man of New Jersey has been ordered to pay $8.6 million in restitution and serve six months of home imprisonment for debuting a series of cyber attacks on the computer network of a leading United States university.

The 22-year-old Paras Jha had earlier pleaded guilty before the U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Jha as well took part in creating click fraud botnets, infecting hundreds of thousands of devices with malicious software.

Shipp, who imposed the sentence earlier this week at the Trenton federal court, also sentenced Jha to five years of supervised release and ordered him to perform 2,500 hours of community service.

According to documents filed in this and other cases and statements made in court, between November 2014 and September 2016, Jha executed a series of Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks on the networks of the New Jersey-based Rutgers University - during which multiple computers acting in unison flooded the internet connection of a targeted computer or computers.

Jha's attacks effectively blocked Rutgers University's central authentication server, which well-kept, among other things, the gateway portal through which personnel, faculty, and students delivered assessments and assignments.

Once in a while, Jha succeeded in taking the portal offline for multiple serial periods, causing harm to Rutgers University, its faculty, and its students.

In December earlier this year, Jha along with Josiah White, 21, of Pennsylvania and the 22- year-old Dalton Norman, of Louisiana had pleaded guilty in Alaska. They were each charged with secret plan to go against the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in operating the Mirai Botnet.

In the summer and fall of 2016, Jha, White, and Norman created a powerful botnet, a group of computers infected with despiteful software and controlled as a group without the cognition or approval of the owners of the computers.

The Mirai Botnet targeted Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as wireless cameras, routers, and digital video recorders.

The suspects attempted to detect both known and previously undisclosed vulnerabilities that allowed them to surreptitiously attain administrative or high-level entree to victim devices for the intent of forcing the devices to take part in the Mirai Botnet.

At its peak, Mirai comprised of hundreds of thousands of compromised devices. Jha and his associates used the botnet to conduct a number of other cyber attacks.

Further, from December 2016 to February 2017, the defendants successfully infected more than 100,000 primarily U.S.-based, internet-connected computing devices, such as home internet routers, with malicious software.

Earlier this month, Jha and his two associates were separately sentenced in a federal court in Alaska to serve a five-year period of probation, 2,500 hours of community service and ordered to pay restitution of $127,000. Jha and his associates voluntarily abandoned significant amounts of cryptocurrency seized during the course of the investigation.

-Sowmya Sangam