Dutchman arrested over one of the biggest ever web attacks
A Dutchman has been arrested by Spanish police over a cyber-attack which inundated the websites of Spamhaus, an anti-junkmail project tracking the most prolific spammers, with huge amounts of data in an attempt to force them offline.
The man arrested is reportedly Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker. Cyberbunker is believed to have launched the "unprecedented attack" in March after Spamhaus blocked some servers it hosted.
Spamhaus, a non-profit organisation, works to keep ads for counterfeit Viagra and fake weight-loss pills out of inboxes, patrolling the Internet to find spammers and update lists of likely perpetrators to network operators around the world.
A Spamhaus spokesman said in a statement: "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.”
He added: "Spamhaus remains concerned about the way network resources are being exploited as they were in this incident due to the failure of network providers to implement best practice in security."