Online piracy rife in Norway

Norway police have nabbed two teenagers in connection with last week’s Distributed Denial of Service attacks targeted primarily at the websites of Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), Germany’s Bild newspaper and the Norwegian Lottery.

The Norsk Telegrambyra press agency hinted that the country’s Police Security Service and financial services group DNB were the two other likely sufferers of the coordinated strikes. However, Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service did not disclose any details.

“We have arrested the two we think were most important in these attacks, but we still want to talk to more people”, Norwegian prosecutor Erik Moestue said, adding that the anti-cyber crime department is yet to figure out the motive behind the attacks.

The two detainees – aged 18 and 19 years – could face a maximum of six years of imprisonment if found guilty, local sources said. The charges against them include waging unauthorised attacks against the Soca website, forcing the firm to shut down the portal.

Even though the attacks did not pose a serious security risk, it nevertheless presented a danger to other clients sharing the same host domain, Soca said in a statement last week, revealing that a Distributed Denial of Service attack badly paralyses servers by bombarding them with huge amounts of data.

It may be noted that Serious Organised Crime Agency recently took action against 36 websites suspected of selling stolen credit card information and other personal data. The last week’s attack was the second one in less than a year as LulzSec hackers targeted the Soca website in June last year.

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