A 15-year-old hacker convicted of multiple felonies was handed an unusual sentence by a Long Beach, California juvenile court on Wednesday, one that will see him all but banned from the internet until his twenty-first birthday.

The hacker's real name was not disclosed because he is a minor, but according to a report, he goes by the handles "Cosmo" or "Cosmo the God."

As a member of the notorious UG Nazi hacker collective, Cosmo participated in an online reign of terror involving many of the year's most significant hacking events, including a DDoS attack that brought down Twitter for several hours.

Cosmo was finally nabbed in June, following a coordinated law enforcement action that also led to 23 other arrests, spread across eight US states and 13 countries. He was eventually arraigned on a laundry list of charges, ranging from credit card fraud, to identity theft and online impersonation, to making bomb threats.

Had he stood trial and been convicted, he faced a sentence of three years in prison. Instead, he pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him, in exchange for a six-year probation that will allow him to avoid incarceration – for a price.

Under the terms of his plea bargain agreement, Cosmo cannot use the internet without the prior consent of his parole officer, for the duration of his probation. Even then, he cannot go online "in an unsupervised manner," and he cannot use the internet for anything but education-related purposes.

Furthermore, he must turn over the usernames and passwords for all of his online accounts, and if he has access to any devices that are capable of connecting to a network, he must identify them to the court in writing. The devices the court already knows about – the ones that were seized in the FBI raid on his home – won't be returned.

Finally, Cosmo is to have no contact with any members of UG Nazi or Anonymous, nor their associates, nor a list of "other individuals," as specified by the court.

Violate any of those terms, and he goes straight to the slammer for the full three-year bid.

A 25-year-old Russian hacker has been arrested for allegedly orchestrating two DDoS (Denial-of-Service) attacks on Amazon.com and eBay in 2008.

"Cyber bandit" Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha was indicted in 2011, but he was just arrested in Cyprus on Wednesday. Zubakha was arrested on an international warrant and is currently in custody pending extradition to the United States.

According to the indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday, Zubakha, with the help of another Russian hacker, planned and executed DDoS attacks against Amazon.com, eBay, and Priceline in June 2008. Zubakha and his co-conspirator launched the attack by programming botnet computers to request "large and resource intensive web pages." According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the attacks made it "difficult for Amazon customers to complete their business on line."

Zubakha and his friend claimed credit for the attacks on online hacker forums, and law enforcement traced 28,000 stolen credit card numbers to the pair in 2009. For that reason, Zubakha and his partner are also charged with aggravated identity theft for illegally using the credit card of at least one person.

"These cyber bandits do serious harm to our businesses and their customers," said U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan in a statement. "But the old adage is true: the arm of the law is long. This defendant could not hide in cyberspace, and I congratulate the international law enforcement agencies who tracked him down and made this arrest."

At present, the charges in the indictment -- conspiracy, intentionally causing damage toa protected computer resulting in a loss of more than $5000, possession of more than 15 unauthorized access devices (credit card numbers), and aggravated identity theft -- are just allegations. Zubakha faces up to five years in prison for conspiracy, up to teh years in prison and a $250,000 fine for intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine for possessing unauthorized access devices, and an additional two years in prison (on top of any other sentence) for aggravated identity theft.