POLICE have today (Friday, October 31) raided the home of a suspected internet hacker after a North-East force’s website was attacked.

The suspect, aged 21, was taken from a property in Halstead Place, South Shields, South Tyneside, at just after 7am.

He was arrested under the Computer Misuse Act and is due to be interviewed by detectives about the attack.

Durham Constabulary’s website was targeted on Sunday, October 19, with an attack on the server of the website.

The operation was carried out by the newly-formed Regional Cyber Crime Unit, which is part of the North East Regional Special Operations Unit (NERSOU) for the Northumbria, Durham and Cleveland police force areas.

A NERSOU spokeswoman said: “Today we have made an arrest of a young man whom we suspect is behind the Denial of Service attack on the Durham Constabulary website.

“These types of attacks are incredibly disruptive and as we move into a more cyber-based world, they deny genuine users of websites access to information they may need very quickly.

“We take these types of attacks very seriously.

“We’ve been set up to tackle high level cyber-attacks and we’re here to protect businesses and members of the public. “

The spokesman added: “The public should be safe in the knowledge that our unit are a dedicated team of detectives here to robustly tackle the threat of cybercrime.”

A spokesman for Durham Police said that in the interests of security, the force could not give specific details of the offence, or the steps put in place to prevent a similar event happening again.

Earlier this year a Government report said that cyber crime costs the British economy an estimated £27bn a year.

Businesses lost £21bn, the Government £2.2bn and citizens £3.1bn.

Martin Sutherland, chief executive of Detica, the consultancy that compiled the report with the Cabinet Office, said the perpetrators of cyber crime ranged from "state-sponsored" criminals to organised crime gangs down to "spotty teenagers sitting in their bedrooms".