Sentencing 24-year-old Aaron Sterritt at Antrim Crown Court, Judge Roseanne McCormick KC said she was satisfied there were exceptional grounds in the background which justified her suspending the jail sentence including the fact that, as well as being a teenager at the time of the offending, Sterritt had also not reoffended while on bail for four years. While she also refused a PPS and PSNI application to impose a Serious Crime Prevention Order, the judge told the court she felt that having the jail sentence “hanging over his head..
.will be an effective deterrent” to prevent further offending. Advertisement Advertisement Did you know with an ad-lite subscription to NorthernIrelandWorld, you get 70% fewer ads while viewing the news that matters to you.
At an earlier hearing Sterritt, from Brookfield Gardens in Ahoghill, entered guilty pleas to a total of eight offences including five counts of conspiring “with others not before the court, to commit unauthorised acts, namely a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack,” on dates between December 2, 2016 and December 21, 2016. He also admitted two offences of falling to comply with a notice to provide passwords and decryption keys to an iPhone, a laptop and a hard drive and a single count of obtaining an article, namely a malicious code from the 'Blazingfast'’ server, intending to use it under the computer misuse act on dates between December 20, 2017 and June 26, 2020. The court heard that using the pseudonyms ‘Vi.
