Schoolboy Arrested Over Biggest DDoS Ever
London police investigating Spamhaus attacks, believed to be the biggest ever, arrested a 16-year-old
Police secretly arrested a 16-year-old schoolboy as part of an investigation into the biggest ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in history, according to a report.
Detectives from the National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU), which will officially launch next week as part of the National Crime Agency, made the arrest last week after seeing large sums of money going through his bank account, according to a report in the Standard. If the report is correct, it raises questions of how and why the police were monitoring the boy’s account.
Massive DDoS
The original attack was aimed at Spamhaus, an anti-spam outfit, but it took out a host of other organisations as the DDoS data floods hit various pieces of key network infrastructure, including the London Internet Exchange (LINX). Portions of the Internet went dark as a result.
The arrest was made in April, but had been kept secret until details were handed to the Evening Standard. The boy’s identity has not been revealed.
According to documents seen by the paper, “the suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums”. “Financial investigators are in the process of restraining monies,” the document read.
It’s believed the power of one of the DDoS attacks, which hit a Tier 1 networking provider, reached over 300Gbps, making it far larger than anything that had been seen before. Nothing of that magnitude has been reported since.
A 35-year-old Dutchman based in Spain had been arrested earlier in the year.
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