A New Jersey man was just one of a trio who pled guilty to hacking charges and creating the devastating Mirai botnet, which spread via vulnerabilities in Internet-connected devices to unleash numerous massive distributed-denial-of-service attacks.

As Ars reported in October 2016, the most serious DDoS degraded or completely took down Twitter, GitHub, the PlayStation network, and hundreds of other sites by targeting Dyn, a service that provided domain name services to the affected sites.