A Romanian hacker was sentenced to one year in federal prison in the US for orchestrating a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the European servers of famous game World of Warcraft.

A United States District Judge ruled the sentence against Calin Mateias, according to a press release from the United States Department of Justice. The Romanian was also ordered to pay USD 29,987 in restitution to Blizzard Entertainment, the Irvine-based owner and operator of World of Warcraft.

Mateias, 38, has been in custody since November 20 after being extradited from Romania. He is accused of having launched DDoS attacks on World of Warcraft servers in Europe between February and September 2010. These attacks caused World of Warcraft servers to crash and prevented some paying customers from accessing the game.

After being indicted in this case in 2011 and extradited from Romania last year, Calin Mateias pleaded guilty in February to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer.

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Irina Marica, irina.marica@romania-insider.com

(photo source: World of Warcraft on Facebook)