 Starting in May 2001, Butler served an 18-month federal prison sentence handed down by US District Judge James Ware.After his release from prison in 2003 on supervised release, Butler exploited Wi-Fi technology to commit cyberattacks anonymously along with Chris Aragon from San Francisco.He advanced to programming malware, such as allowing the Bifrost trojan horse to evade virus scanner programs and exploited the HTML Application feature of Internet Explorer to steal American Express credit card information.