The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has arrested a California man and charged him with launching repeated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against an online forum and Web sites. 

The FBI charged the man with four federal counts of attacking servers that hosted CastleCops, a Web site that helps expose Internet scams, anti-fraud and anti-phishing sites, and also attacked the servers of a Canadian Web and graphics design community known as KillaNet Technology, Ltd.

The man, Gregory King, reportedly used a botnet he had created after infecting about 7,000 computers to attack the servers.  King had many online nicknames he used in a number of Gmail and Yahoo email addresses, according to the FBI, and launched his attacks from his parents’ house, a public library, a Best Buy retail store and a McDonald’s restaurant.  King was arrested as he fled out the back door of his parents’ house with his laptop, which he ditched into the bushes.  The FBI promptly recovered the laptop and then nabbed King.

Cybercriminals have used CastleCops as a target before, most recently having hacked PayPal accounts to send fraudulent donations to the CastleCops site, and then making it seem that CastleCops had initiated the fraud. CastleCops has been under DDoS attacks for weeks and the FBI hopes that the arrest of King is the beginning of the end of the attacks.

If convicted of the charges, King will serve 10 years in prison and be subject to a $250,000 fine.

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