Teenager charged following cyber attack on Cheshire Police website

Detectives have charged a man in connection with a number of cyber attacks targeting the websites of police forces including Cheshire Constabularies.

Liam Reece Watts, of Stratford Road, Chorley, has been charged with two counts of unauthorised acts with intent to impair the operation of or prevent or hinder access to a computer.

The 19-year-old has been remanded in custody and is due to appear Chester Magistrates’ Court on Thursday 28 March.

A cyber attack is a malicious and deliberate attempt by an individual or organisation to breach the information system of another individual or organisation.

The charges relate to two Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites belonging to Cheshire Constabulary and Greater Manchester Police.

DDoS attacks are among the most common type of hacker attacks, DDoS initiates multiple invalid requests to a network host, the host uses all its resources responding to the invalid requests and ignores the legitimate requests.

DDoS attacks against networks and hosts can cause systems to crash and data to be lost, the attack on the Cheshire Police website took place last Friday, March 22.