Ukranian Police arrested a 16 yrs old teenager last month on charges of attacking a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) to gain personal information about the users. The police (Ukranian) says that the teen used the technique of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks to take down the local ISP. This happened after the local ISP refused to give the teenager the details of the user. The severity of the attack made the ISP contact law enforcement last year to resolve the issue.
"The officers at Ukraine Cyber Police hunted down the 16 yr old attacker in the city of Odesa in January," said the spokesperson for the Ministry of Internal Affairs in a conversation with ZDNet. We explored the teen's home and confiscated all the devices. Upon investigation, the teen was found guilty of the attack. According to the authorities that conducted the preceding inspection of the defendant's system, the authorities found software that the teen used to launch the DDoS attacks. Besides this, details of 20 different accounts related to distinct hacker forums were also found," said the Cyber Police of Ukraine in a statement.
As per the Criminal Law of Ukraine, the person found guilty of DDoS attack faces imprisonment for up to 5 yrs in jail. However, the teen is not charged for the attempt of extortion to the ISP. The Ukrainian Police has denied releasing any further information regarding the case. It has also not disclosed the person affected by the DDoS attack saying, "the investigation is still in process." It is not the first incident where a DDoS attack was performed to steal user information.
In several other cases, the hackers were able to take down the ISP network using a simple technique like DDoS Botnet. Other instances similar to this case appeared in countries like Cambodia, Liberia, and various other countries in South Africa. As per the observations, to perform attacks on massive scales of Junk Traffic, the hackers use DDoS Botnet, which is very capable. This happened in Liberia. Carpet Bombing is another efficient technique to perform such attacks (as per the incidents that happened in South Africa).
