The Dutch police have bagged another teenager in the WikiLeaks hacker hunt. This time it was a 19-year-old who was nabbed on suspicion of hacking into a government website. So far, this is the second arrest made by the Dutch police of a teenager linked to the WikiLeaks brouhaha.
The young man was arrested on Saturday afternoon in Hoogezand-Sappemeer after he was suspected to have been involved in an attack on the national prosecutor’s website.
Apparently an anonymous group took responsibility once again for the cyber attacks, citing that they were designed to avenge the arrest of the 16-year-old who had previously been arrested for similar cyber attacks. It appears that both of the teens, as well as this “anonymous” group, have been involved in denial of service attacks (or ddos). These attacks use robotic computer systems to overload the servers of the target website.
From what I’ve read it appears that the maximum sentence for a denial of service attack is six years of prison…plenty of time for them to brush up on their skills.
I’m not sure why these guys are so adamant about attacking big-time websites like Amazon, PayPal, and government sites…but I sure hope they don’t attack my little podunk site. No way I have that kind of server space.
(c) 2010 AFP (via PhysOrg)
