Two teens are under arrest in separate hacking cases in Europe.
The first case came as a result of the massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against anti-spam outfit Spamhaus earlier this year. In that case a 35-year-old Dutch man police believe to be Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker, faces charges after his arrest in Spain because he was a suspect in the attack.
RELATED STORIES
Two Busted in Ransomware Plot
Guilty Plea in Espionage Case
Hacker Sold Access to Networks
Cyber School CEO Busted
But what just now came to light was at the same time, a 16-year-old London boy ended up held by the London Metropolitan Police because of similar suspicions.
Not much information is available about this teen other than he is out on bail and will appear before a court later this year.
According to a report by the London Evening Standard, “the suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums,” and had a “significant amount of money flowing through his bank account.”
Investigators said he was or is a member of an international cybercrime gang, and police kept his arrest quiet for so long was an attempt to prevent the rest of the group from figuring out something was wrong.
The DDoS attack against Spamhaus in late March has reached some 300 gigabits per second at peak hours, making it the largest DDoS attack in history of the Internet and, according to some reports, causing temporary service deterioration.
Meanwhile, in the other teenager arrest case, the officers of Germany’s Cyber Crime Competence Center (4C) of the State Criminal Police Office have linked the 18-year-old male to a DDoS attack that paralyzed the official website of the State of Saxony-Anhalt, and took it offline for several hours.
For weeks administrators could not update the website.
The attack was for the National Data Center in Hall which, among other things, operates the victimized website.
The suspect ended up tracked by the police to his apartment, where they found copies of the data stored in the data center.
The suspect is an 18-year-old student from Hamburg. Police are still not sure what his motives were.