A 27-year old Scot has been arrested under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act on suspicion of launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A joint operation between the US secret service and Scottish police culminated in a raid in Elgin, northeast Scotland in which a number of houses were searched.
In an interview with the BBC Detective Chief Superintendent Stephen Ward said, "Operation Casper has involved the Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency (SDEA) working closely with the US Secret Service and is an excellent example of how law enforcement agencies, working together, can impact on internet-related crime."
DDoS attacks from remote areas such as northeast Scotland are not unusual. In recent months groups have been arrested in Russia for similar crimes. The attacks, in which websites are overloaded with requests from a number of compromised or 'zombie' computers, are used to extort companies that rely on their websites for business, such as online bookmakers.
For Ward, though, there is a flip-side. "The internet does offer criminals new ways of committing crime but it also offers investigative opportunities to law enforcement that the SDEA will continue to exploit," he said.
