Dutch Man Arrested In Connection With Cyber Attack Against Anti-Spam Organization

A man has just been arrested in Spain in connection with last month's large-scale cyber attack on the non-profit organization Spamhaus.

According to a report by Reuters, the 35 year old male was taken into custody in Barcelona by Spanish police, and is being officially identified only by the initials "S.K." According to the Dutch public prosecutor's office, officials also seized computers and mobile phones from his residence.

The man will be charged for his alleged part in a series of serious attacks on Spamhaus. The London and Geneva based non-profit group helps to fight back against spammers by publishing blacklists used by Internet service providers to improve their email filters.

Spamhaus's work is directly or indirectly responsible for helping to filter as much as 80% of email spam messages on a daily basis. It is not entirely clear at this time why S.K. targeted Spamhaus in particular.

Last month, the organization was assaulted by a series of heavy distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks for over a week. DDoS attempts were also made against Spamhaus's partners in the United States, Netherlands, and Great Britain. It appears S.K. targeted locations where anti-spam databases are managed.

At the time, Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said it a "small miracle" the organization had been able to remain online during the attacks.

The DDoS attempt was particularly aggressive. These attacks are measured in the bits sent per second, with the more data sent, the more likely it will overwhelm the servers. Typically, most attacks peak at 100 billion bits per second. The attack on Spamhaus hit a record 300 billion bits per second, according to CloudFlare Inc, a company Spamhaus hired to help them through the assault.

S.K. will be charged for his part in these DDoS attacks, and is expected to be turned over to Dutch authorities in the near future.