Manchester Man Charged With Crashing Gene Simmons' Web site

FBI Special Agents arrested a 24-year old Manchester on Tuesday and charged him with attacking and shutting down the official Web site of Kiss frontman Gene Simmons.

According to court documents provided by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Central California Andre Birotte Jr., Kevin George Poe was arrested this morning at the federal courthouse in Hartford on charges of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer for his alleged involvement with the Anonymous hacking group.

Poe, who goes by the screen name spydr101, and other hackers linked to the Anonymous group allegedly conducted a distributed denial of service attack against genesimmons.com over a five-day period in October of 2010, according to court documents. Poe is alleged to have used a Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a popular software tool among members of the Anonymous hacking group, to send a very large number of requests to Simmons’ Web site in a short period of time, effectively overwhelming the Web site’s ability to handle the requests and forcing it to crash.

According to a YouTube video of a report on the Finanical News Network, Simmons was targeted by members of Anonymous after he made the following comments during a panel discussion on building entertainment brands: 

"Make sure your brand is protected. Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. The music industry was aseleep at the wheel, and didn't have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we're left with hundreds of thousands of people left without jobs. There's no industry."

Poe appeared before a U.S. District Court judge today, where he was released on a $10,000 bond and ordered to appear in federal court in Los Angeles on a date that has yet to be scheduled. If convicted of both charges, Poe could face a maximum penalty of 15 years in federal prison.