UK secretly arrested 16 year old for Spamhaus DDoS attack

Britain’s National Cyber Crime Unit arrested an unnamed 16 year old boy several months ago on suspicion of being involved in the March attack against Spamhaus. The operation that netted the arrest came during a series of coordinated raids and was codenamed "Rashlike."

RT reports that the arrest of the teenager, whose name is not being disclosed, is a part of the investigation into the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Spamhaus on March 20 this year. That day, servers of the Dutch anti-spam organization, which tracks e-mail spammers and spam activity, were at one point being inundated with 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps) of data, three times larger than the previous record attack of 100 Gbps.



The teenager fell under suspicion after “significant sums of money” were found to be “flowing through his bank account,” the London Evening Standard reported Thursday.

“The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums,” the daily cited a briefing note by the National Cyber Crime Unit.

According to the Evening Standard, the arrest was made in April at the boy’s home in southwest London, but details of it were just recently disclosed to the newspaper “ahead of the formation of the government’s new National Crime Agency.”

The newspaper did not say whether criminal charges had been brought against the boy, if he was being held in custody and whether he was providing police with information about possible associates.