I never liked Gene Simmons anyway.  -- rick

Feds raid home of teen fingered in DDoS on Gene Simmons

Attack followed tongue-lashing against file-sharers

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/09/kiss_gene_simmons_ddos_probe/

Posted in Crime, 9th May 2011 19:35 GMT

Federal authorities have raided the home of a suburban Washington family after 
tracing a crippling attack on the website of Kiss frontman and anti-piracy 
crusader Gene Simmons to an internet connection there.

According to an affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Scott Love, the 
distributed denial-of-service attacks on www.genesimmons.com, 
www.simmonsrecords.com and www.kissonline.com commenced on October 14, 10 days 
after the aging rocker castigated artists and record labels alike for not doing 
more to pursue people who download music for free on the internet.

“The music industry was asleep at the wheel and didn't have the balls to sue 
every fresh-faced, freckle-based college kid who downloaded material,” Simmons 
said during an address at the MIPCOM conference in Cannes, France. “And so now 
we're left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There's no 
industry.”

Simmons also encouraged musicians to “be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their 
homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line.”

People claiming affiliation with the Anonymous hacker and griefer collective 
quickly denounced the comments and encouraged members to take action. The DDoS 
attacks that followed took Simmons's websites offline for about 36 hours, 
according to the FBI's Love. When service was restored, Simmons posted a rant 
to his site that told the attackers “we will sue their pants off” and warned 
“they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who's been 
there for years and is looking for a new girl friend.”

On October 18, Simmons websites came under a new round of attacks that lasted 
four days, even though they had been moved to a new webhost. The assaults cost 
Simmons as much as $25,000 in downtime and expenses associated with changing 
servers and hosts.

According to Love, some of the junk traffic that brought down the websites came 
from the residence of Darrin M. Lantz, of Gig Harbor, Washington. The IP 
address in the home pinged one of the targeted websites 48,471 times during a 
47-minute period.

Attempts to contact the Lantzes weren't successful, but according to 
KOMONews.com, federal agents, with guns drawn, raided the Lantz home recently 
and seized a computer belonging to a teenager who lived there.

“I had no idea,” Rhoda Lantz was quoted as saying. “All they said was something 
about internet crime.”

There are no reports of any charges being filed in connection to the raid.

The report comes as corporate executives, authorities and journalists sift 
through often contradictory claims about the involvement of Anonymous in 
attacks on the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture 
Association of America and more recently on sites such as PayPal, Visa, and 
MasterCard for cutting off services to whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.

A Sony executive last week implicated Anonymous in attacks that stole data from 
more than 100 million users of the PlayStation Network and the company's online 
PC games website. Since then, dueling posts in blogs and news websites have 
offered conflicting accounts, with some claiming the loosely organized group 
had nothing to do with the Sony hacks and other saying that members likely were 
involved.

The affidavit is here. ®
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