British police said on Friday they had arrested a man in
northwest England following the 2014 cyber attacks on Sony PlayStation and
Microsoft Xbox systems. Both systems suffered long outages over Christmas after
a major distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. A hacking group calling
itself Lizard Squad, which had attacked the
two networks earlier last year, claimed responsibility.
A DDoS attack is a method to overload a server with
requests and eventually make its network or machine unavailable for its
users. In fact, Lizard Squad soon started sellingits distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attack tool.
“Officers … have
arrested a man in Southport, Merseyside this morning as part of an
investigation into ‘swatting’ and computer hacking offences,” Merseyside police
said in a statement.
The officers had worked
closely with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the operation,
it added.
No further details of
the arrest were immediately available.
Swatting is a term used
to describe criminal activity by an individual or group who provide false
information to law enforcement agencies in the United States, suggesting that a
threat exists at a particular location so that police respond with tactical
units.
A report on Serocu.org.uk states, “An 18-year-old man was arrested this morning (16/1) in
Boundary Street, Southport on suspicion of unauthorised access to computer
material contrary to section 1 of Computer Misuse Act 1990, unauthorised access
with intent to commit further offences contrary to section 2 of Computer Misuse
Act 1990 and threats to kill contrary to Section 16 of Offences against the
person Act 1861.”
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