He was arrested last year after a series of major DDoS attacks

Jun 30, 2014 22:23 GMT  ·  By

A 17-year-old from London has been charged with several offenses, computer misuse and fraud being among them, as a result of an investigation conducted by the National Crime Agency in the United Kingdom.

According to a statement from the law enforcement agency, the teen was arrested last year in April, after multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that resulted in the disruption of Internet exchanges and services all over the world.

Upon arresting him, the police officers seized a number of electronic devices. The detectives from the National Crime Agency also found that the suspect had “a significant amount of money flowing through his bank account.”

There isn’t much information available in the statement, but judging by the fact that last year's major DDoS incident that fits the details above was against Spamhaus, one could conclude that the 17-year-old was part of the group that conducted it.

Up until February this year, when an almost 400Gbps DDoS attack was mitigated, the one against Spamhaus held the record for the largest amount of junk traffic directed towards a target.

Online reports from September of last year tell of an arrest back in April which “followed an international police operation against those suspected of carrying out a cyber attack so large that it slowed down the internet.”

We contacted the National Crime Agency for more details on the matter, but we have not received a reply yet.