Federal prosecutors have accused Mitchell L Frost was an undergraduate student at the University of Akron of carrying out a series of botnet offenses including attacks that brought down the websites of a number of conservative politicians.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks lasted over a five-day period.

The attacks rendered each website inoperable, at least temporarily, and required intervention and repair by the owners of such sites, causing huge damages or losses.

Frost, who went by the handle "FrostAie," also stands accused of using his botnet to launch a much bigger assault on a University of Akron server that knocked out the college's entire network, depriving "tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff members" of connectivity for more than eight hours. Prosecutors said the attack appeared to be a mistake and that the intended target was an unnamed gaming server that was hosted on the university network. Nevertheless,the outage cost the university more than $10,000.

Prosecutors also accuse Frost of using his botnet to steal credit card information. When agents raided Frost's dorm room they allegedly retrieved almost 3,000 stolen login credentials, and 136 pieces of data for compromising card accounts.

Ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/19/bill_oreilly_ddos_attacks/