A Wisconsin man who joined an Anonymous online protest for one minute has been sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to repay $183,000 to Koch Industries.

Eric Rosol admitted to federal prosecutors that he took part in a distributed denial-of-service attack Feb. 28, 2011, coordinated by the hacker activist group that shut down the company’s Kochind.com website for about 15 minutes.

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Company owners Charles and David Koch were targeted due to their campaign to limit the bargaining power of trade unions.

The 38-year-old Rosol pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of accessing a protected computer using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon Code software investigators found on his computer.

The DDoS attack lasted for only one minute, but Rosol was prosecuted under a 1980s law – the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – that many online activists say encourages sentences that rarely fit the crime.

Rosol’s attorney and prosecutors agreed that the company lost less than $5,000 as a result of the DDoS attack, but Koch Industries complained that it had hired a consulting firm to improve security for its websites at a cost of $183,000.

Another member of Anonymous, 28-year-old Jeremy Hammond, was sentenced last month to 10 years in prison for hacking into the analysis firm Strategic Forecasting’s computers to access consumers’ credit card information and email addresses.

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However, Hammond’s supporters say he was acting as a whistleblower against government surveillance and data collection.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]