Connecticut Man Allegedly Affiliated with Anonymous Arrested on Charges of Attacking and Shutting Down Gene Simmons’ Website

LOS ANGELES—FBI special agents this morning arrested a Connecticut man who is charged with waging a denial of service attack against GeneSimmons.com, a website operated by the frontman for the rock band KISS.

Kevin George Poe, 24, of Manchester, Connecticut, who used the screen name “spydr101,” was taken into custody without incident at the federal courthouse in Hartford. Poe made his initial appearance this morning in United States District Court, where a judge ordered Poe released on a $10,000 bond and ordered him to appear in federal court in Los Angeles on a date that has yet to be scheduled.

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles returned an indictment last week that accused Poe of being affiliated with the Anonymous hacking group. The indictment specifically charges Poe with two counts—conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer.

During a five-day period in October 2010, Poe and others linked to 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. According to the indictment, Poe used a favorite software tool of the Anonymous collective—a Low Orbit Ion Cannon, which is a computer program that is used to send extremely large numbers of “packets” or requests over a network in an attempt to overwhelm a target computer.

If convicted of the two counts in the indictment, Poe would face a statutory maximum penalty of 15 years in federal prison.

The case against Poe was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Los Angeles Field Office. Poe was arrested by special agents at the FBI New Haven Field Office.