Felony hacking charges were handed down Wednesday to a Massachusetts man accused of disrupting the computer networks of Boston-area hospitals with a 2014 digital protest waged under the name of hacktivist group Anonymous.
Martin Gottesfeld, 32, was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday on one count each of computer hacking and conspiracy related to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks suffered by Boston Children’s Hospital and the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network, a residential treatment facility in nearby Framingham.
Mr. Gottesfeld was arrested in February, and has been held at a detention center in Rhode Island for the last eight months while investigators assembled their case. He’ll likely plead not guilty when formally arraigned next week before U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler, his wife, Dana Gottesfeld, told The Washington Times on Thursday. The charges each carry a maximum prison sentence of five years apiece.
Prosecutors say Mr. Gottesfeld plotted and participated in a cyber campaign against facilities he perceived to be part of “the troubled teen industry,” or institutions involved in the the treatment of adolescents with serious emotional, psychological and medical problems.
By overloading their computer networks with illegitimate internet traffic, authorities say the self-described human rights activist caused the facilities’ systems to suffer from setbacks that disrupted operations and resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses and damages.
Investigators say Mr. Gottesfeld led DDoS attacks in March 2014 that “lasted for more than a week, crippled Wayside’s website during that time and caused it to spend more than $18,000 on response and mitigation efforts.”