British hacker-for-hire convicted in Germany for role in Deutsche Telekom cyberattack

The 29-year-old British hacker who admitted to launching the massive cyberattack that disrupted the internet connections of approximately one million Deutsche Telekom customers in November 2016 has been convicted by a German court this week.

Named only as Daniel K,, the regional court based in Cologne handed the man a suspended sentence of a year and eight months for "attempted commercial computer sabotage", Reuters reported. The computer hacker-for-hire faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Daniel K. is still facing criminal charges in Britain and authorities have already requested his extradition.

A Deutsche Telekom spokesperson Alexia Sailer told Reuters: "We will await the written judgement and weigh if we should go with a civil case."

Online, the man was known under a slew of aliases, the most popular of which included "Spiderman" and "BestBuy". He pleaded guilty on Friday 21 July.

Journalist Brian Krebs linked his online activities to a man named Daniel Kaye and reported that he was also involved in the GovRAT malware operation.

While speaking in a German court on 21 July the hacker called the incident "the worst mistake" of his life and claimed he had been paid £7,600 ($10,000) by a telecommunications firm in Liberia to disrupt the business of a competitor via the use of a botnet.

He later used a notorious malware strain known as Mirai to power the botnet but it eventually escalated out of control, with a bewildered Deutsche Telekom reporting at the time that more than 900,000 of its 20 million fixed-line customers faced internet connectivity issues.

The company said the cyberattack caused roughly £1.7m (€2m) of damage and stressed that the full effects were felt for days. The Mirai botnet hit the headlines in October 2016 after taking down a slew of websites – including Netflix and Twitter – running on the service provider Dyn.

It was used to launch a series of unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Upon analysis, experts found it could hijack and enslave internet of things (IoT) devices. Daniel K. was arrested by the UK National Crime Agency (NCA) in February this year at Luton airport as part of a European Arrest Warrant issued on behalf of Germany's federal police.