David Chesley Goodyear, 44, of El Segundo, California, has been convicted of directing a relentless cyber-attack against an Oklahoma-based telescope retailer, crippling its online operations for weeks. A federal jury in Oklahoma City found Goodyear guilty of orchestrating distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Astronomics and its online community Cloudy Nights in August 2016, flooding the sites with traffic until they became unreachable to legitimate users.
The attacks exploited botnets—networks of malware-infected devices remotely controlled by hackers—to drown the websites in junk data. The assault began shortly after Goodyear was locked out of Cloudy Nights, a massive astronomy forum hosted by Astronomics in Norman, Oklahoma. Once a frequent participant under multiple aliases, Goodyear had been banned repeatedly for threatening behavior and violating site rules, including sending abusive messages to moderators and administrators.
On August 13, 2016, Goodyear tried to log in as ‘JamesSober’—a username already banned days earlier. Denied access, he resurfaced under a new alias, ‘HawaiiAPUser,’ unleashing a barrage of explicit and profane posts. In one message, he explicitly threatened: ‘I will talk with [my] contacts and just DOS this site as well as A55tronomics.’ Within hours, the DDoS attacks began, hammering the websites intermittently for over two weeks.
Investigators traced the attacks through digital footprints linked to Goodyear’s primary IP address and online activity. When questioned by law enforcement in August 2016, Goodyear admitted responsibility. Evidence presented during the two-day trial included logs of the attacks, forum posts, and forensic data tying the botnet traffic directly to his control. The jury deliberated for just 90 minutes before returning a guilty verdict.
Goodyear now faces up to ten years in federal prison, three years of supervised release, a $250,000.00 fine, and must pay full restitution to the victims. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys McKenzie Anderson and William Farrior in the Western District of Oklahoma. Sentencing has been scheduled for a later date by the court.
The conviction stems from an investigation led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with critical support from the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force in Los Angeles—including personnel from the Los Angeles Police Department. The takedown marks a rare win in the shadowy world of cyber grudges turned criminal, where online feuds escalate into federally prosecuted offenses.
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Key Facts
- State: Oklahoma
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: Cybercrime
- Source: Official Source ↗
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