Iowa Man Sentened in Federal Court for Cyber Attack on Koch Industries Subsidiary
| U.S. Attorney’s Office February 13, 2014 |
James L. Santelle, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, announced that on February 12, 2014, Jacob Allen Wilkens (age 24) of Postville, Iowa, was sentenced by Magistrate Judge James R. Sickel to 24 months’ probation and ordered to pay $110,932.71 in restitution.
Wilkens had previously pled guilty to 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.
Wilkens 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.
The case was investigated by Special Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation field offices in Iowa and Wisconsin. It was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Daniel R. Humble of the Eastern District of Wisconsin.