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British musician jailed over involvement in Anonymous DDoS attack

By | Published on Tuesday 9 December 2014

Anonymous

British producer and session guitarist Jake Commander has been sentenced to ten days in prison by a US court for his part in an Anonymous attack on MasterCard’s website in 2010.

According to The Washington Times, Commander, then living in New Hampshire in the US, entered an Anonymous chatroom on 10 Dec 2010 and in, as he puts it, an “impulsive, spurious and foolish” move, clicked a lick to aid the hacker group in flooding the credit card provider’s website with traffic, taking it offline and costing the company over $1 million. It had been, he said, a “protest” against the banks that had “brought the country to its knees”.

Two years later he and his family moved back to England, but during a trip back to the States last year Commander was arrested and charged for his part in the cyber attack. Although, according to his lawyer, around 2000 people took part in the Anonymous action, the musician was one of only thirteen people charged and initially faced ten years in prison.

When sentenced yesterday to ten days in jail, with one day on credit for time served after his arrests, Commander said that he was “mortified to have upset the government of this country, which has been my host for many years”.

Like his co-defendants, he was given the option of serving his time at weekends, though requested to take all ten days consecutively, meaning he will be free early next week, at which point, his lawyer said, he plans to return to England and never come back to the US again.

Now retired from the music industry, Commander worked with artists including Elton John, George Harrison and ELO during his career.



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