World of Warcraft computer attacker sentenced

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Romanian man who deliberately overloaded World of Warcraft’s computers has been sentenced to a year in U.S. federal prison.

Calin Mateias (Kuh-LEEN’ Muh-TAY’-uhs) of Bucharest was sentenced Monday in federal court in Los Angeles.

Prosecutors say between February and September 2010, Mateias launched distributed denial of service attacks on company servers, blocking access to the online role-playing game for thousands of European players.

Prosecutors say Mateias got into disputes with other players so he sent a huge number of superfluous requests to World of Warcraft’s computer system, causing game servers to crash.

As part of his sentencing, Mateias was ordered to pay nearly $30,000 to Irvine-based Blizzard Entertainment to compensate the World of Warcraft operator for the cost of countering his attacks.