Cyberattack Suspect Had 'Bunker' in North Spain

 

Cyberattack Suspect Had 'Bunker' in North Spain

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 28, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/04/28/world/europe/ap-eu-spain-cybercrime.html?ref=world

 

 

 

MADRID (AP) - A Dutch citizen arrested in northeast Spain on suspicion of

launching what is described as the biggest cyberattack in Internet history

operated from a bunker and had a van capable of hacking into networks

anywhere in the country, officials said Sunday.

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The suspect traveled in Spain using his van "as a mobile computing office,

equipped with various antennas to scan frequencies," an Interior Ministry

statement said.

 

Agents arrested him Thursday in the city of Granollers, 35 kilometers (22

miles) north of Barcelona, complying with a European arrest warrant issued

by Dutch authorities.

 

He is accused of attacking the Swiss-British anti-spam watchdog group

Spamhaus whose main task is to halt ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus

weight-loss pills reaching the world's inboxes.

 

The statement said officers uncovered the computer hacker's bunker, "from

where he even did interviews with different international media."

 

The 35-year-old, whose birthplace was given as the western Dutch city of

Alkmaar, was identified only by his initials: S.K.

 

The statement said the suspect called himself a diplomat belonging to the

"Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Republic of

Cyberbunker."

 

Spanish police were alerted in March by Dutch authorities of large

denial-of-service attacks being launched from Spain that were affecting

Internet servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the U.S. These

attacks culminated with a major onslaught on Spamhaus.

 

The Netherlands National Prosecution Office described them as

"unprecedentedly serious attacks on the nonprofit organization Spamhaus."

 

The largest assault clocked in at 300 billion bits per second, according to

San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus enlisted to help it

weather the onslaught.

 

Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic, jamming it with

incoming messages. Security experts measure the attacks in bits of data per

second. Recent cyberattacks - such as the ones that caused persistent

outages at U.S. banking sites late last year - have tended to peak at 100

billion bits per second, one third the size of that experienced by Spamhaus.

 

Netherlands, German, British and U.S. police forces took part in the

investigation leading to the arrest, Spain said.

 

The suspect is expected to be extradited from Spain to face justice in the

Netherlands.

 

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