Dutch man arrested in connection with cyber attack on Spamhaus

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A 35-year-old Dutch man has been arrested in Barcelona by Spanish police over last month's massive cyber attack which disrupted global internet services, the Dutch public prosecutor's office said on Saturday.

The man, who was identified by the Dutch public prosecutor only by the initials "S.K.", was arrested in connection with attacks on Spamhaus, the public prosecutor's office said, adding that the house where he was staying was also searched, and that the police seized computers and mobile phones.

Spamhaus, a London and Geneva-based non-profit group which helps weed out unsolicited "spam" messages for email providers, said last month it had been subjected to "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attacks on an unprecedented scale for more than a week.

"(S.K.) is suspected of unprecedented heavy attacks on the non-profit organisation Spamhaus, where anti-spam databases are managed. These so-called DDoS attacks last month were also performed on Spamhaus partners in the United States, the Netherlands and Great Britain," the prosecutor's office said.

The man is expected to be expected to be handed over to the Dutch authorities, according to the statement.

Spamhaus publishes blacklists used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to weed out spam in email traffic.

The group is directly or indirectly responsible for filtering as much as 80 percent of daily spam messages, according to Cloudflare, a company that said it was helping Spamhaus mitigate the attack. (Reporting by Sara Webb; Editing by Stephen Powell)