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Cyber attack on the courthouse

He attacked a county court’s email system to stop a hearing, and the email servers of his victims’ law firm. He is serving the sentence now.

1 September 2022 · Date of offense

William Easton Horner attacked the courthouse email system on the day of her domestic violence protection hearing

The recorded date of offense is the day his ex-wife’s protection order hearing was scheduled. He was indicted on 2 November 2022 and reindicted on 18 April 2023 on those counts plus two more.

The day after, he published an account of it on LinkedIn. He titled it “Cuyahoga County Email Bomb DOS…After Action Report,” dated it 2 September 2022, and put his own job title on the byline — “Easton Horner, CTO at Millennial Realty and Investments / White Hat Hacker.” It opens by quoting the First Amendment.

In it he writes that he “used the protections afforded me under the First Amendment to launch a #whitehat ‘email bomb’ DOS attack on the Cuyahoga County Courthouse.” He sets out what he sent: about 12,000 copies of the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, the works of the Buddha and “the first 1000 lines of human chromosome 1” — fired from three servers at once at the judge and her staff attorney, then re-aimed at the court’s chief stenographer when one address held. He states the purpose plainly: to “force them to have to reschedule our 10:45a ‘Trial.’”

He records the timings himself — begun at about 11pm the night before, stopped at about 1:30pm, 14.5 hours in total — and closes with a section headed “Good Faith Suggestions for Improvement from Attacking White Hat.” The article was later filed in court against him as an exhibit.

He had described the capability nine months earlier. In a notarised filing of 21 December 2021 he told the divorce court that as “CTO of MRI” he had built “a proprietary email marketing engine,” reporting that in 2021 “ARIEA sent over 476K emails for the Firm.” Weeks before this attack he had warned the Chief Justice of Ohio that the material would be “broad spectrum email blasted to more than 30 million” people.

Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas · Nos. CR-22-675557 and CR-23-680296-A

See also. His memorandum to the Supreme Court of Ohio, and the technology review in which he described building the engine. The hearing he was trying to stop produced a five-year protection order. His victims’ law firm and the Cleveland Clinic each obtained protection orders of their own.

12 December 2024 · Guilty plea

He pleaded guilty to two felonies, and a judge ordered him into counselling

William Easton Horner pleaded guilty to two fourth-degree felonies — attempted retaliation (R.C. 2923.02 / 2921.05) and disrupting public service (R.C. 2909.04(B)) — and to two counts of telecommunications harassment (R.C. 2917.21(A)(7)), first-degree misdemeanours. A third count, of retaliation, was dismissed.

He was sentenced to five years of community control, sixty days in the county jail, a $12,000 fine, restitution, a no-contact order covering his victims, and monthly psychological counselling. A prison term of seventeen months remains suspended over him.

Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas · Judge Timothy J. McGinty · State of Ohio v. Horner, No. CR-23-680296-A

See also. The pattern of filings behind all of this is set out in the chronology.

18 December 2024 · Restitution ruling

The judge called them revenge crimes

Ordering him to pay his ex-wife’s law firm, the sentencing judge wrote:

“The victim’s law firm was most definitely harmed by the defendant’s revenge crimes and is entitled to full restitution for its out of pocket expenses caused by the defendant’s purposeful email attack as well as expenses related to the preparation for the expected electronic assault after the domestic relations court had been electronically assaulted.”

The same ruling limited what the firm could recover, holding it was not entitled to payment for its lawyers’ or staff time.

Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas · Judge Timothy J. McGinty · No. CR-23-680296-A

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