Dutch police arrest teenage KPN hacker

Following weeks of surveillance, a 17-year-old boy from Barendrecht, The Netherlands was arrested by local police for orchestrating a major cyber attack on Dutch telecom, KPN.

According to Telecompaper, the unidentified teenager is being held under suspicion of breaking into hundreds of KPN’s servers on January 16 — servers which held sensitive customer information. Authorities tracked the hacker online, building a case. On several occasions, they found him boasting about his crimes to Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology students in a chat room. The hacker reportedly employed several aliases, including “xS,” “Yoshioka” and “Yui.”

Several pieces of computer hardware thought to be used during the cyber attack were seized from the boy’s home, including laptops, hard drives and USB sticks, Dutch police revealed. Along with the online chat logs, the evidence was overwhelming.

In a press statement on Monday, Wim de Bruin, spokesperson for the Dutch Public Prosecution Service, confirmed the hacker had confessed to the January hacking. According to de Bruin, the teenager will not be tried as an adult, but still faces up to two years in prison. A judge ordered the suspect to be detained for the next two weeks, after which he could see conditional release pending a full trial.

Contrary to recent hacker arrests, the Dutch teen doesn’t appear to have any connections to major hacktivist collectives, such as LulzSec and Anonymous. Several members of the latter group, which claimed to have disbanded last June following a short, but prolific existence, were arrested this month after outed LulzSec founder Hector Xavier Monsegur started naming names for the FBI. (via Naked Security)