A teenager from Surrey has been charged with a cyber-attack on Mumsnet, forcing the parenting website to reset the passwords of its 7.7 million members.
David Buchanan, 18, of Haslemere, Surrey was charged with three offences under the Computer Misuse Act following investigation by the Metropolitan Police Cyber-crime Unit (MPCCU).
A statement from the Met Police says, “The charges relate to various incidents of computer intrusion and damage to network profiles following attacks on systems controlled by the website Mumsnet and others between July and August 2015.”
The Mumsnet homepage was redirected to a Twitter profile page (now suspended) that had posts edited during a cyber-attack in August. The parenting site was also subjected to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Back in August, Justine Robert, co-founder of Mumsnet, suffered a swatting attack as part of an attempt to force Mumsnet offline with a DDoS attack.
The MPCCU investigation of this incident is ongoing. Buchanan was bailed to appear at Guildford Magistrates' Court on 7 June.
