St. Louis Man Sentenced in Federal Court for Cyber Attack on Koch Industries Sudsidiary

James L. Santelle, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, announced that on February 5, 2014, Christopher Michael Sudlik (age 22) of St. Louis, Missouri, was sentenced by Chief United States District Judge William C. Griesbach.to 36 months’ probation and 60 hours of community service and ordered to pay $110,932.71 in restitution.

Sudlik had previously pled guilty for his participation along with members of the online hacker group Anonymous in a distributed denial of service attack against the Angel Soft bathroom tissue website in February and March 2011. Angel Soft is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the intended target of the attack.

Sudlik and others utilized a “low orbit ion cannon” designed to flood the Angel Soft server with traffic with the intention of disrupting the website’s service. The Angel Soft server is located in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Koch Industries suffered several hundred-thousand dollars in loss as a result of the continuous attacks on several of its network servers over a three-day span.

In sentencing the defendant, Judge Griesbach noted the “serious nature of the offense” and decried Sudlik’s “arrogance” for believing that his political beliefs were necessarily superior to those with whom he disagreed. The judge admonished the defendant for “crossing the line” from appropriate political speech to an illegal and costly cyber attack.

The case was investigated by special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in St. Louis. It was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Daniel R. Humble of the Eastern District of Wisconsin.