Servers. Photograph by Torkild Retvedt
Spanish police have reportedly arrested a 35 year old Dutchman suspected of being behind the huge web attack at the end of March that affected a number of web services around the world.
The man arrested is 35 year-old Sven Kamphuis, owner of “bad boy” dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker, who was picked up by police in Barcelona following a request from the Dutch public prosecutor.
The attack he is alleged to have organised was targeting the anti-spam firm Spamhaus, but by targeting the web’s underlying DNS architecture, it also affected a wide range of websites and web services around the globe. The distributed Spamhaus infrastructure, was not taken offline as it moved its connections to other server farms in other countries when its Dutch servers were targeted.
The size of the attack, however, was unprecedented, with the 300 gigabits of data being sent at Spamhaus’ servers every second is six times bigger than the sort of DDOS attacks that are more regyularly sent to take down banks’ websites or other similar targets.
On new of the arrest, a Spamhaus spokesman said:
“Spamhaus is delighted at the news that an individual has been arrested and is grateful to the Dutch police for the resources they have made available and the way they have worked with us”
Kamphuis is expected to be transferred to the Netherlands “very soon” according to a spokesman for the Ducth police, which said they are also co-operating with British and US investigations into the attacks.
