UK police avert hack attempt on Royal Wedding website on day true story

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Summary: A plot to bring down the Royal wedding website during the day's proceedings were met by London's police force. But who could have been behind such an attempt?

Scotland Yard's said on Tuesday that its cybercrime division helped counter an attack to the official website of the Britain's Royal wedding in April, during the proceedings where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge tied the knot.

Det. Supt. Charlie McMurdie told a London cyber-security conference that preventative measures were enacted to protect and safeguard the website, which had one of the highest traffic of all UK websites in the history of the web, from a denial-of-service attack that could have brought the website down.

Who was behind the attempted hack? Iranian dissidents who remain furious with Western intervention? The hacking collective LulzSec or hacktivist network Anonymous, responsible for a series of high-profile hacks and leaks? Dare I say it, the Chinese government?

Close. Well, not really. It was a 16-year-old teenager.

N'awwr. Source: Flickr, CC)

The comments were made at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence policy think tank. But when asked for more information by the Associated Press, she said that the cybercrime division had been "called in" by the government to deal with an attack.

Though no further details were given about the attack, a Scotland Yard spokesperson, home of London's police force, said that the 16-year-old "had been detained" on October 10th in relation to a "suspected attempt to encourage others to commit a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack".

The Royal wedding was watched by an estimated 2 billion people worldwide, and viewed by just shy of half the British population — with an estimated half a million flocking to the BBC's website to watch the feed.

YouTube partnered with the Royal Channel on the Google-owned video-sharing site to offer a feed on the official Royal wedding website, which stayed steady throughout the day. Many of the websites offering feeds, including the BBC and YouTube struggled at times to balance the load of the vast number of people visiting the sites, with some intermittent downtime during the proceedings.

The official Royal wedding website said that during the peak of the ceremony, it was handling over 2,000 requests a second.

The website, owned by Clarence House, the main London residence of the heir-apparent Charles, Prince of Wales, which makes the site a UK government property.

The teenager is currently out on bail and has yet to be charged with an offence, the spokesperson said.

Related:

Zack Whittaker, a criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, Canterbury, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

Disclosure

Zack Whittaker

I worked briefly with Microsoft UK in 2006 but no longer have any connection with the company. Regardless, I remain impartial and unbiased in my views.

I don't hold any stock or shares, investments or industrial secrets in any company, but have signed confidentiality agreements with a number of UK and U.S. organisations, whose names I am not at liberty to disclose.

I was involved with Kent Union, the University of Kent's student union, undertaking voluntary, non-salaried, elected positions between early 2009 and mid-2010.

No other company, body, government department, non-governmental organisation or third sector organisation employs me or pays me a salary in any capacity whatsoever.

As a freelance journalist, whenever expenses are given and taken by a company that is not CBS Interactive, these will be disclosed in each relevant post to ensure transparency.

I currently work with a UK law enforcement unit. Details of which are restricted, but this is an entirely separate position which bears no connection to other work.

(Updated: 23rd October 2011)

Biography

Zack Whittaker

Zack Whittaker, criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, UK, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

After studying criminology at university, though still in his early-20's, he has already had a series unconventional work and voluntary positions. He has worked with researchers studying neurological illnesses like Tourette's syndrome (which he suffers from), has given lectures on the nature of disabilities in the public community, and occasionally ends up speaking on television and radio discussing the events of the day.

He first had academic work published at the age of 22, then still an undergraduate, and has been cited by a wide range of publications: from the Huffington Post, Business Insider, AllThingsDigital, The Atlantic Wire and CBS News.

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