British police arrest 18-year old over Christmas Xbox, Playstation hacks

British police said on Friday they had arrested a man in northwest England following the 2014 cyber attacks on Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox systems. Both systems suffered long outages over Christmas after a major distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. A hacking group calling itself Lizard Squad , which had attacked the two networks earlier last year, claimed responsibility.

A DDoS attack is a method to overload a server with requests and eventually make its network or machine unavailable for its users. In fact,  Lizard Squad   soon started selling its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack tool.

“Officers … have arrested a man in Southport, Merseyside this morning as part of an investigation into ‘swatting’ and computer hacking offences,” Merseyside police said in a statement.

The officers had worked closely with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the operation, it added.

No further details of the arrest were immediately available.

Swatting is a term used to describe criminal activity by an individual or group who provide false information to law enforcement agencies in the United States, suggesting that a threat exists at a particular location so that police respond with tactical units.

A report on Serocu.org.uk states, “An 18-year-old man was arrested this morning (16/1) in Boundary Street, Southport on suspicion of unauthorised access to computer material contrary to section 1 of Computer Misuse Act 1990, unauthorised access with intent to commit further offences contrary to section 2 of Computer Misuse Act 1990 and threats to kill contrary to Section 16 of Offences against the person Act 1861.”

With inputs from Reuters