A Call of Duty player is in hot water after the eagle eyes of Activision spotted him cheating.
Officers from the Manchester Metropolitan Police’s e-crime unit have arrested a 17-year-old boy in the Berwick section of Manchester, UK, this week in connection with a series of denial of service attacks on Call of Duty players.
The boy is believed to have used a program he bought online, which allows the user to attack specific people or websites with a DoS attack, forcing them out of the game by flooding their IP address with pings and using up all their bandwidth. Activision spotted the boy’s activities in September and contacted the police, who were then able to trace his IP address and found out where he lived. The boy was arrested under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990, and is currently in police custody.
Detective Inspector Paul Hoare said that this type of crime was not only damaging to the people and companies affected, but was often a precursor to more serious computer-related offenses. It’s important to note that it wasn’t the fact that the boy wasn’t arrested just for cheating, it was how he was doing it that got him in trouble. Denial of service attacks are taken rather seriously by the police, although it’s likely that, if convicted, the boy’s punishment will be relatively minor.
Source: BBC
Published: Dec 10, 2010 11:16 am