A 22-year-old hacker has been ordered to pay US$8.6 million in damages and serve six months house arrest for helping launch a series of massive cyber-attacks.

Paras Jha was one of three people responsible for the Mirai Botnet, a network of more than 100,000 infected Internet-connected devices. The corrupted systems were primarily used for financial gain in the form of advertising fraud.

The botnet was also used to launch cyber-attacks against business Web sites by flooding them with Internet access requests.