Meet The British teenager who made $70,000 selling programs that crashed 200,000 websites

Dejabooter’s teen developer crashed 200,000 websites for earning money.

The British teenager who made $70,000 by selling programs which crashed 200,000 websites has been convicted of hacking. Grant Manser of Worcestershire was convicted on 10 counts and has been sentenced to two years in juvenile detention with 18 months suspension.

Manser is now 20 years old. He started development at the age of 16 and was arrested in November 2014 for causing website crashes through his software. He sold his software to around 4000 customers who in turn crashed 224,548 websites by using his software, a few of which include businesses, schools, colleges, and government departments from Poland, France, the United States, and the Netherlands.

He was being recognized as hacker for website crashing spree but his lawyer insisted that he did that to earn money and he is not a hacker.

“He is not a hacker. The system doesn’t take or hack any information from the websites being attacked. He was only 16 years old when he started to do this and it was his immaturity and naivety which led him to commit these offenses,” said Jamie Baxter, the defense lawyer in the case.

Manser developed four tools:

• Dejabooter
• Vex-Stresser
• netspoof
• Refinedstresser

called “stressers” which could launch a multi level Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the target website. They were being sold on the dark web for as low as $7 – $30. He was able to earn $70,000 using his Paypal account.

Manser was convicted in Birmingham Crown Court under six charges of Computer Misuse Act and four charges of Serious Crime Act. He will be serving an 18 months suspension, 100 hours of unpaid work and an £800 fine. The judge described him as “young and naive”.