Home searched over cyber crime network

A WEBSITE blamed for more than four million cyber attacks across the world has been shut down.

Two men from Lanarkshire in Scotland were among seven people arrested, while an address in Bradford, West Yorkshire – linked to attacks on seven of the UK’s biggest banks – was searched.

Other arrests were made in Serbia, Holland, Croatia and Hong Kong, while servers were seized in Germany as the service was shut down yesterday.

Europol said the website was considered the world’s biggest seller of so-called distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, in which high volumes of internet traffic are launched at target computers to disable them.

Investigators said cyber criminals used the website, which could be rented for as little as $14.99 (£10.70), to launch more than four million attacks around the globe.

It had more than 136,000 registered users and could be rented by people with little or no technical knowledge to cripple online services offered by government institutions, police forces and banks.

The National Crime Agency, which led the probe, said its officers identified a “criminal infrastructure” in Holland as part of an ongoing campaign against hackers operating ‘DDOS-forhire’ services.

Senior investigating officer Jo Goodall said: “A significant criminal website has been shut down and the sophisticated crime group behind it stopped as a result of an international investigation involving law enforcement agencies from 11 countries.”