Iowa Man Sentenced in Federal Court for Cyber-Attack on Koch Industries Subsidiary

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 for his participation along with members of the on-line hacker group “Anonymous” in a distributed denial of service attack against the Angel Soft bathroom tissue website in February and March of 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.