Career
He was later arrested and pled guilty to defacing the websites of Drug Abuse Resistance Education and Republic of South Africa Security, as well as unauthorized access of the United States. Army and Air Force computer systems at four military bases. On February 7, 2000, a smurf attack generating over 1 gigabit per second of ICMP traffic was launched against Yahoo!"s routers, causing their websites to be inaccessible to the world for hours. In a message sent to the Centre of Excellence for Applied Research & Training, Yahoo! network engineer January B. Koum stated that the attackers were "above your average script kiddie" and "knew about our topology and planned this large scale attack in advance."
Shortly thereafter, Stanford University"s computer security administrator David Brumley began monitoring Internet Relay Chat (IRC) traffic on irc.stanford.edu, which was then a public server on the EFnet IRC network.
Over the following week a series of equally crippling denial-of-service attacks affected many other major internet sites including eBay, Amazon.com, East*TRADE, and Buy.com.
A security consultant named Joel de la Garza also began investigating the IRC channel and while he was in the channel, Republic of South Africa Security"s website was redirected to a hacked web server in Colombia with a defaced copy of their home page. The defacement included a reference to David Brumley"s nickname on IRC, as he had joined the channel by then in an attempt to gather more information from Moran.
De la Garza witnessed this live show of criminal activity and later reported about it to the media. On March 5, 2000, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Moran"s house and seized his computers.
Despite the incriminating chat transcripts and possession of the contents of his computers, Moran was not charged with any crime by federal prosecutors.
After having so much attention drawn to him, and de la Garza"s account of Moran being responsible for defacing Republic of South Africa "s website, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Moran"s connections to other website defacements. Eventually they passed this evidence on to the New Hampshire Attorney General"s office and Moran was charged as an adult with 7 counts of Class A felony unauthorized access of a computer. One year later, on March 9, 2001, he pled guilty to 4 counts of misdemeanor unauthorized access of a computer and was sentenced to 12 months in jail with 3 months suspended as well as ordered to pay $15,000 United States dollar in restitution.
His arrest took place in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.
Moran died of a heroin overdose on April 14, 2013, aged 30, in Berkeley California, news of which was posted on the drug discussion website bluelight.org.
