A teenager from Brazil has claimed responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Essex Police’s website, following a similar attack on another force earlier this week.
Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the same Twitter account which had claimed responsibility for the DDoS which made the Greater Manchester Police website unavailable earlier this week.
An Essex Police spokesperson confirmed to The Register that “before 1pm [3 September], the Essex Police website went offline for around 30 minutes following a denial of service attack.”
They added: “Officers investigating the suspected denial of service attack on the Essex Police website … are liaising with other law enforcement agencies to identify any investigative leads.”
The Twitter account @n0w1337 claimed responsibility for the attack to The Register. We asked how long they intended to keep the site down for.
“They are trying to restart maybe in a few minutes I stop” we were told shortly before the attack stopped.
The account, which locates itself in Lithuania, communicated with El Reg in what is either non-native English or fairly sophisticated stylometry-foiling jargon.
Despite overwhelmingly targeting British-based websites, @n0w1337 mostly follows accounts located in Brazil. When asked if they were Brazilian they told us: “Yes I am Brazilian but I like Lithuania … looked now that some matter of saying I’m lithuania”
Asked how old they were, and why they had so much time to be a nuisance, they told us:
I will do 19 years coming hihi ^.^
I graduated high school and I’m doing nothing at home have enough time to come to college next year
@n0w1337 added that they didn’t fear being caught. “But who’s going to get me? I think that there is nothing wrong someone makes things worse type that handles all the media and banks and the government stealing.”
“Nothing I do is wrong.” they added, incorrectly, thanks to Section 36(3) of the Police and Justice Act 2006, although some digital activists maintain that DDoSing is little more than a form of sit-in protest. Perpetrating such attacks currently carries a maximum of 10 years’ imprisonment in the UK.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/04/essex_police_ddos/
