UK Arrest Over Xbox Live and Playstation Network Outages

An anonymous reader writes Neowin.net is reporting the arrest of one Vincent Omari, a UK citizen [see also this Daily Mail story from a few days ago mentioning Omari], in the Christmas Day DDoS attacks on Sony's PSN and Microsoft's XBL systems: "In documents sent to Neowin, Vinnie Omari has been accused of 'hacking of the Playstation Network and Xbox Live systems over the Christmas Period'... While this is the first arrest related to the recent service disruptions, it may not be the last... In further conversations with those who are familiar with the investigation and the arrest, Omari believes that the police will not find anything of substance on his computers. His alleged crime is that he helped coordinate the DDOS attack on the service."

Comments

Re:Shouldn't this be a civil case?

[damn_registrars]

No, missuse of a computer system is a criminal offence

Generally, misusing your own computer system is not a criminal offense unless you really go to extremes. If I set my router to ping flood Sony or Microsoft all day long that generally is not a criminal offense. Previously it was said that this "Lizard Squad" attack was done by a group of people, until we have an idea of how many people were in said "squad" it will be really hard to say whether or not any one person had a meaningful role individually.

And yes, there was effectively destruction of property, and you heard of it.

Either we have heard of different outcomes of the DDoS, or we disagree in the meaning of "effectively". There was business lost, but I am not aware of any property that was destroyed which belonged to Microsoft or Sony.

Funny

[lapm]

Since when its hacking if you ddos someone? your not penetrating system, just sending it massive amounts of traffic to make it choke...