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UK man charged over attack on Mumsnet

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Dissent

There’s been an arrest in the attacks on parenting site Mumsnet. Charlie Osborne reports:

A British man has been charged in connection to a cyberattack against Mumsnet which knocked the popular parenting website offline.

Mumsnet experienced a data breach earlier this year when a hacker broke into the website’s servers and exploited administration privileges to redirect the site to a Twitter account which posted messages such as “RIP Mumsnet” and “Our DDoS attacks are keeping you offline,” as well as launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the domain.

Read more on ZDNet.

The Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit issued the following release on May 23:

The Met’s Cyber Crime Unit (MPCCU) has charged a man with three offences under the Computer Misuse Act. 

[A] David Gerrard Buchanan, 18 (25.02.98) of Vann Road, Haslemere, Surrey was charged on Saturday, 21 May with two counts of causing a computer to perform a function to secure / enable unauthorised access to a programme / data, contrary to section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and also one count of unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of or prevent / hinder access to a computer, contrary to section 3 of the Computer Misuse act 1990.

The charges relate to various incidents of computer intrusion and damage to network profiles following attacks on systems controlled by the website Mumsnet and others between July and August 2015.

Buchanan was bailed to appear at Guildford Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, 7 June.

The MPCCU continues to investigate this incident. Anyone with information is encouraged to contact police via 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or by visiting crimestoppers-uk.org/give-information/give-information-online

Anyone concerned around cyber crime and fraud can seek online assistance from www.getsafeonline.org or www.actionfraud.police.uk

Two 17-year-old boys [B] and [C] were interviewed under caution in relation to the above incident, they have both been eliminated from the inquiry with no further action being taken.

Category: HackMiscellaneousNon-U.S.Other

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