The group had five more members, from the U.S., Russia and China

Jul 8, 2014 22:53 GMT  ·  By

Anti-spam organization Spamhaus applauded the efforts of law enforcement agencies to arrest and charge participants to the massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that was directed against its assets in March 2013.

A little over a week ago, UK’s National Crime Agency posted an announcement that they managed to charge a 17-year-old British national, who had been arrested in April 2013, “after a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks which led to worldwide disruption of internet exchanges and services.”

They did not give specific information to say if he was involved in the DDoS attack against Spamhaus, but the clues are all there. Before that, law enforcement had arrested a Dutch national living in Spain.

Spamhaus hopes that the other attackers in the group that called itself Stophaus will also be charged by the police.

Stophaus recruited members from underground forums in order to launch an attack against the anti-spam organization. They managed to affect infrastructures such as websites, mail servers and name servers.

Spamhaus says that the rest of the attacking group consists of two United States nationals, two Russians, and a Chinese national. Additional actors involved are “several more spammers and cybercrime-involved server hosting company owners were peripherally involved and at this time most have been identified by both Spamhaus and law enforcement.”

At the time, the DDoS attack was the largest one the Internet had ever seen. Even so, the attackers did not manage to bring Spamhaus down, as hosts and DNS partners and the global distribution of anti-spam data was not interrupted.