California Grad Student Arrested In International DDoS Crackdown

A California grad student is among the 34 arrested last week during the cybercrime sweep conducted from The Hague by Europol’s European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3), says the FBI. The 26-year-old Sean Sharma was charged with buying a tool to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a San Francisco chat website.

The arrests were made during a cybercrime prevention drive against users of “DDoS for hire” services by law enforcement authorities of 13 countries and assisted by Europol and the International Cyber Crime Coordination Cell (IC4) in the US.

The campaign is targeting mainly young adults and has a two-pronged goal - apprehending those involved in cybercrime and discouraging others to go down this path. Europol says young offenders, many below the age of 20, were mostly involved in hacking, use of malicious software, and DDoS attacks.

“No law enforcement agency or country can defeat cybercrime alone," the Bureau's statement said. “This demands a collective global approach.”

Read details here.