Last March, the largest cyberattack ever recorded was launched against the servers of Spamhaus, an international non-profit dedicated to battling spam.
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack peaked at 300 gigabits per second, the highest such number ever recorded, according to Spamhaus CEO Steve Linford, slowing Spamhaus’s servers to a crawl as they were buried with dummy data.
The attack was so overwhelming that it slowed the entire global Internet. Cybersecurity authorities from five separate nations investigated the attacks.
The catalyst for the attack is believed to be Spamhaus blacklisting CyberBunker, a Dutch Internet service provider famous for hosting any website except child pornography and terrorism. Spamhaus accused CyberBunker of hosting spam and had its service terminated.
CyberBunker was also notable for hosting The Pirate Bay and mirrors of WikiLeaks.
In April, 35-year-old Sven Olaf Kamphuis, a vocal CyberBunker spokesman, was arrested in Spain in relations to the attack.
Now, the London Evening Standard reports that another another arrest was made in April, this time a 16-year-old from East London.
When British police from the National Cyber Crime Unit found the boy, he was sitting in front of his computer, logged into “various virtual systems and forums.” The investigation uncovered large amounts of money flowing through his bank account, so much that, six months later, financial investigators are still sorting through all of it.
The arrest had been kept secret until this week. The boy has been released on bail until later this year.
The news follows two recent London rounds of cybercrime arrests. Last week, eight men were taken into custody, accused of a £1.3 million cyberheist against Barclays. Two weeks ago, a dozen Londoners were busted in connection with a plot to boobytrap computers in a remote bank robbery.
H/T Naked Security / Illustration by Jason Reed