Dutch police website attacked after arrest of suspected hacker

Just a day after Dutch police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with Wikileaks-related denial-of-service attacks, websites belonging to the Netherlands computer crime cops and prosecutors have been struck with a similar assault.

Dennis Janus, a spokesman for the National Police Service confirmed that both the police website, and that of the National Prosector’s Office had been offline for much of the day, with many theorising that the likely reason is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack similar to that which was launched against Mastercard, PayPal and other firms.

Janus didn’t confirm that the downtime of the websites was definitely connected with the ongoing attacks by WikiLeaks supporters, but you…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.

Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.