Thread: Dutchman appears for 'biggest ever' cyberattack

Spain arrests suspect in massive cyberattack - CNN.com

Suspect in 'biggest cyber attack in history' had hack van, bunker

A Dutch citizen arrested in northeast Spain on suspicion of launching what is described as the biggest cyber attack in internet history operated from a bunker and had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country, officials said on Sunday.

The suspect travelled 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 on Thursday in the city of Granollers, 35 kilometres 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 which produces a blacklist of spammers, including those distributing 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 US These attacks culminated with a major onslaught on Spamhaus.

The Netherlands National Prosecution Office described them as "unprecedentedly serious attacks on the nonprofit organisation Spamhaus."

The largest assault clocked in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare, which Spamhaus enlisted to help it weather the onslaught.

The attack was later described by critics as a PR stunt for CloudFlare, but Spamhaus confirmed it was the biggest attack ever leveled at its operations.

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 cyber attacks - such as the ones that caused persistent outages at US 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 US police forces took part in the investigation leading to the arrest, Spain said.

WA Today

A DUTCHMAN arrested in Spain last month in connection with an unprecedented cyberattack that reportedly slowed down the Internet, has been extradited to the Netherlands where he appeared before a judge on Wednesday, Dutch prosecutors said.
Sven Olaf Kamphuis, 35, was transferred to the Netherlands on Monday night following his arrest last month in Barcelona by the Spanish police.

"He appeared today before a Rotterdam judge," the Public Prosecutor's office said in a statement with Dutch national news agency ANP reporting he was remanded behind bars for another two weeks.

Prosecutors only identified the suspect by his initials "S.K." but a source close to the investigation said it was Kamphuis, who acted as a spokesman for the Dutch web-hosting service Cyberbunker at the time of the attack.

The late March attack targeted Spamhaus, a Geneva-based volunteer group that publishes spam blacklists used by networks to filter out unwanted email, and lead to cyberspace congestion.

Spamhaus blamed Cyberbunker for the attack.

Kamphuis describes himself on his Facebook page as Minister of Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs for the Cyberbunker Republic.

Computers, storage devices and mobile phones were seized during the Barcelona raid and prosecutors said Wednesday the investigation was continuing.

"The Dutch investigation into the DDoS attacks on Spamhaus is still going ahead full-steam, being led by police's Team High Tech Crime unit," the statement said.

So-called distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) essentially bombard sites with traffic from various sources in order to disrupt or seize servers.

The attack was described as the most powerful ever seen and slowed web traffic.

The attacks began, according to Spamhaus, after it placed Cyberbunker, a web hosting firm that "offers anonymous hosting of anything except child porn and anything related to terrorism", on its blacklist.

Cyberbunker said it had been unfairly labelled as a haven for cybercrime and spam.

Spamhaus, which also has offices in London, essentially patrols the Internet to root out spammers and provides updated lists of likely perpetrators to network operators around the world.

Experts said the attacks flooded Spamhaus servers with 300 billion bits per second (300 gigabytes) of data.

Prior DDoS attacks have been measured at 50 gigabytes per second.

Because of the way Internet traffic flows, these DDoS attacks create congestion and ripple effects around the web.

Are we going to see a perp walk for the people behind the DDos on RS? Something like this would make me cackle.

Simon Perp.JPG

Leading to

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http://tecnologia.elpais.com/tecnolo...76_428995.html

Sounds like a piece of work. He seems to have "liked" the Boston bombings on Facebook.