Arrest made in cyberattack threat against Tax Office; Nu.nl also hit

The police arrested a 17-year-old boy from Alkmaar on Wednesday for threatening the Tax Office with a DDoS attack on their website. On Tuesday and Wednesday the boy threatened to make the tax site unreachable, so that many people will not be able to submit their tax returns on time. The cyber crime team of the Midden-Nederland unit and the high tech crime team of the National Unit worked together on this investigation, which led them to the teenager. During a DDoS attack a site's servers are overwhelmed with thousands of requests. The servers overload, making the site unreachable. The threats against the tax office came from the same Twitter account that claimed a DDoS attack on NU.nl on Monday. The attack had the news agency's site offline for a short time.