Police arrest London schoolboy for massive DDoS attack

The UK police have secretly arrested a London  schoolboy over the ''world's biggest cyber attack'' in an international swoop against a suspected organised crime gang.

The 16-year-old's detention at his home in south-west London came after ''significant sums of money'' were found to be ''flowing through his bank account''. He was also logged on to what, according to officials were ''various virtual systems and forums.'' 

His computers and mobiles were seized as officers worked overnight for potential evidence.

The move came after detectives from the National Cyber Crime Unit, followed an international police operation against parties suspected of involvement in a massive cyber attack that slowed down the internet.

The ''distributed denial of service'' or ''DDoS'' attack targeted the Dutch anti-spam group Spamhaus which patrols the web to keep prolific spammers from flooding inboxes with adverts for all kinds of dubious products.

According to the police document, the Spamhaus attack in March was the "largest DDoS attack ever seen," which they claim, hit the performance of the London Internet Exchange hard, adding the attack caused "worldwide disruption of the functionality" of the internet.

How big the attack was can be seen from the fact that on 18 March, Spamhaus and its networking partner CloudFlare started getting attacked at around 90 Gbps.

The attack, however failed to take down the site, following which, the attack went upstream to ISPs and internet exchanges in Amsterdam and London, and by 22 March Spamhaus servers were getting hit with over 300Gbps.

However, despite the hype internet data did not suffer any disruption. According to the London Internet Exchange, "minor amount of collateral congestion in a small portion of our network," was experienced and Spamhaus' services were not seriously affected.

Spamhaus had been targeted more than most because of the work it was engaged in. The organisation compiled lists of ISPs, domains, and email servers that were known spammers so service providers could block off huge chunks of incoming emails.

In 2011 the Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker was  temporarily blacklisted by Spamhaus, which allowed customers to use its services for absolutely anything "except child porn and anything related to terrorism."

Denying the Spamhaus charges, Cyberbunker claimed it was acting as an internet vigilante.

According to commentators, though using a teenager's bank account was not the smartest move, it would not be the first time arrests were due to such lapses.