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The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of man suspected of taking part in a massive DDoS attack against the anti-spam group Spamhaus back in March.

The 35 year-old man is a Dutch national but was arrested at his home in Barcelona under a European arrest warrant, the Netherlands National Prosecution Office told the BBC. His computers and a mobile phone have been seized and he will be extradited to the Netherlands on charges of aiding "unprecedentedly serious attacks on the non-profit organization Spamhaus."

"Spamhaus is delighted at the news that an individual has been arrested and is grateful to the Dutch police for the resources they have made available and the way they have worked with us," said a Spamhaus spokesman.

"Spamhaus remains concerned about the way network resources are being exploited as they were in this incident due to the failure of network providers to implement best practice in security."

Although the identity of the man hasn't been released it has been suggested that he's Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker, which has been feuding with Spamhaus for years and is claimed by some to be responsible for the DDoS attack.

Cyberbunker is a Dutch company based in a former nuclear bunker that provides anonymous hosting of anything except terrorist or child pornography websites. The firm denies being responsible for spam, but Spamhaus has listed it on its spammers blacklist, to the Dutch firm's considerable annoyance.

Whether that irritation spawned the massive DDoS attack remains to be seen, but investigators in the Netherlands, UK, and US are very keen to find out who was behind it. Last month's attacks on the Spamhaus servers saw 300Gbps of traffic coming from an estimated 30,000 unique DNS resolvers – including inadvertently from El Reg's own Trevor Pott – and internet traffic was slowed as a result of the enormous flows in data. ®

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