Greek police arrest teen on hacking charges

The 18-year-old is alleged to have hacked into Interpol's website and others in France and the U.S.

Police in Greece have arrested an 18-year-old Athens man on suspicion of hacking into the Interpol website and other government sites in the U.S. and France.

The man, whose name was not released, made an appearance in an Athens court on Tuesday. He faces charges of computer fraud, forgery, data use and violations related to the possession of guns and flares, according to the Hellenic Police. U.S. and French authorities assisted in the investigation.

Authorities allege the man conducted the attacks with software used to create botnets, which are computers that are hacked and then remotely controlled by an attacker often without the knowledge of the computer's owner, according to an official at the Secretariat General of Communication, part of Greece's Ministry of Interior.

It is suspected he also conducted distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, a type of attack that usually intends to make a website become unavailable. The attacks occurred in February 2008 and February 2009 when the man was 16 years old.

The man was arrested in a Monday raid where police seized two laptops, hard disks, two pistols, €7,850 ($US11,461) plus $3,000 in cash hidden inside a book modified to secretly store the money. They also confiscated 125 blank credit cards and five that had been encoded with account information not belonging to the man.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com

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