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Young Dutch hacker arrested for WikiLeaks attacks

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A 16-year-old Dutch hacker was arrested for launching cyber attacks on opponents of WikiLeaks, the Dutch public prosecution said on Thursday.

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The boy was arrested Wednesday night, who was presumably involved in the cyber attacks by WikiLeaks backers on the websites of MasterCard and Paypal, which have suspended their services to WikiLeaks recently.

After Juilian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks was arrested in Britain, his sympathizers launched online attacks on the websites of the Swedish public prosecutors, the Swiss postal banking, credit card companies Visa and MasterCard, and payment site Paypal.

The Dutch public prosecution said they began to hunt down the suspect as an investigation showed these attacks came from the Netherlands.

The cyber attacks, called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), forced thousands of computers to shut down, and temporarily brought down the websites of Visa and MasterCard.