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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He is accused of attacking the Swiss-British anti-spam watchdog group Spamhaus<\/a> whose main task is to halt ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills reaching the world’s inboxes.<\/p>\n The statement said officers uncovered the computer hacker’s bunker, “from where he even did interviews with different international media.”<\/p>\n The 35-year-old, whose birthplace was given as the western Dutch city of Alkmaar, was identified only by his initials: S.K.<\/p>\n The statement said the suspect called himself a diplomat belonging to the “Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Republic of Cyberbunker.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The Netherlands National Prosecution Office described them as “unprecedentedly serious attacks on the nonprofit organization Spamhaus.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Netherlands, German, British and U.S. police forces took part in the investigation leading to the arrest, Spain said.<\/p>\n The suspect is expected to be extradited from Spain to face justice in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n Biggest cyber attack in history slows global Internet<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n US warns of cyber attacks and market runs<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Twitter security in spotlight<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n LulzSec hacking group leader arrested<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Hackers fake White House explosions from Associated Press Twitter account<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMore cyber crime news<\/h3>\n