An 18-year-old youth from Oosterhout has been arrested on suspicion of involvement in some of last week’s cyber attacks on the tax office and IT news site Tweakers.

The youth, who was picked up last Thursday by the police high tech crime unit, is also thought to have been behind a string of other attacks in September last year.

Information about those attacks on online bank Bunq was combined with reports on last week’s attacks, leading to the suspect, police said.

Floris van den Broek, director of internet security company Redsocks, which was involved in the investigation, told the Volkskrant that the youth had left enough digital traces to be tracked down.

Tweakers was able to trace the youth because he had claimed responsibility for the attack on the website using a pseudonym. ‘Although he used a vpn connection, he had not hidden all his tracks properly,’ the website said.

Police are also trying to establish if the youth had a role in the attacks on the big three Dutch banks last week, the Volkskrant said. He will appear in court for a remand hearing later on Tuesday.

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attackers use computer networks they control to send such a large number of requests for information from websites that servers that host them can no longer handle the traffic and the sites become unreachable.