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.
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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With all due respect the "nerds" in the super duper secret security dept that no one knows the name of least themselves should award the people especially the "BOYS" a medal, without these breakin's to their super secure systems just shows if these lads can do it, then what have the less desirable people been up to or capable of or have already hacked and the nerds are to shy to let on.
Should be honoured. As usual, USA has it all wrong.