British police said on Friday they had arrested a man in northwest England following the 2014 cyber attacks on Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox systems.
British Police Arrest Man in Christmas Xbox, PlayStation Hacks
The denial-of-service attacks caused long outages on the game services over the holidays.
Reuters / Jonathan Alcorn
Both systems suffered long outages over Christmas after a major distributed denial of service attack. A hacking group calling itself Lizard Squad, which had attacked the two networks earlier last year, claimed responsibility.
“Officers … have arrested a man in Southport, Merseyside, this morning as part of an investigation into ‘swatting’ and computer hacking offenses,” Merseyside police said in a statement.
The officers had worked closely with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in the operation, it added.
No further details of the arrest were immediately available.
Swatting is a term used to describe criminal activity by an individual or group who provide false information to law enforcement agencies in the United States, suggesting that a threat exists at a particular location so that police respond with tactical units.
(Reporting by Stephen Addison; editing by Kate Holton)
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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