Kiss Hacker Arrested
Someone tried to shut down Gene Simmons\' website
Hennemusic reports that Kevin Poe, of Manchester, CT, was taken into custody without incident by FBI agents at the federal courthouse in Hartford.
The FBI alleges that during a five-day period in October 2010, Poe and others linked to the hacking group Anonymous allegedly conducted a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Simmons’ computer systems, sending tens of thousands of electronic requests designed to overload the computer server and render the website useless.
Poe was charged in a federal grand jury indictment in Los Angeles with one count each of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. If convicted on both counts, Poe would face a statutory maximum penalty of 15 years in federal prison.
Poe made his first appearance in U.S. District Court, where a judge ordered him released on a $10,000 bond and required Poe to come to Los Angeles at a date yet to be determined.
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles returned an indictment last week that accused Poe of being affiliated with the Anonymous hacking group.
Last October, Anonymous launched "Operation Payback,” a coordinated series of attacks on opponents of internet piracy. The group was motivated to provide ‘payback’ to denial of service attacks on torrent sites that shared copyrighted material by attacking piracy opponents, pro-copyright organizations, legal firms and individuals who spoke out publicly on the issue.
It is thought that Simmons was specifically targeted for his comments at MIPCOM in Cannes last October, where he spoke against copyright theft during a panel discussion, saying "Make sure your brand is protected. Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line."
"The music industry was asleep at the wheel," Simmons continued, "and didn't have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we're left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There's no industry."