[5] His father was a Vietnam War veteran and computer store owner who married a daughter of Ukrainian immigrants.
[11] After moving to Half Moon Bay, California, he changed his last name to Vision and lived in a rented mansion "Hungry Manor" with a group of other computer enthusiasts.
During this time, he developed 'an online community resource called the "advanced reference archive of current heuristics for network intrusion detection systems," or arachNIDS.
'[14] In the spring of 1998, Butler installed a backdoor onto American federal government websites while trying to fix a security hole in the BIND server daemon.
[18] Butler also targeted Citibank by using a Trojan horse towards a credit card identity thief and began distributing PINs to Aragon, who would have others withdraw the maximum daily amount of cash from ATMs until the compromised account was empty.
[19] Arrested in 2007, Butler was accused of operating CardersMarket, a forum where cyber criminals bought and sold sensitive data such as credit card numbers.
[20] After prison, Butler will also face 5 years of supervised release and is ordered to pay $27.5 million in restitution to his victims.
[22] Prosecutors say that a former cellmate named Jason Dane Tidwell stayed in touch with Butler via an encrypted messaging app and that, in the spring of 2016, Butler allegedly told Tidwell to buy a remotely piloted drone with some of the debit card scam proceeds to deliver contraband by airdrop.