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Six people were arrested in the UK in 2015 on suspicion of using LizardStresser to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The National Crime Agency (NCA) later confirmed six arrests in Operation Vivarium, an investigation into customers of a DDoS-for-hire website. The available accounts describe arrests and allegations; they do not establish that these six people were convicted.
What happened in Operation Vivarium
In its 2015 report, SecurityWeek described six males aged 15 to 18 as having been arrested. They were suspected of using LizardStresser to attack a national newspaper, a school, gaming companies and online retailers. SecurityWeek reported that the suspects came from Manchester, Stockport, Northampton, Milton Keynes and Huddersfield, that computer equipment was seized from one suspect, and that the six were released on bail.
Those details are from the contemporary news report. The NCA’s later Operation VIVARIUM account confirms six UK arrests but does not independently provide the ages, locations, alleged targets, seizure or bail details.
What LizardStresser was
The NCA described Lizardstresser.su as a website offering a “DDoS-for-hire service.” A DDoS attack attempts to overwhelm an online service with traffic, making it difficult or impossible for legitimate users to access it. In this case, the agency’s account concerns people suspected of using the service—not a consumer product or a legitimate tool.
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How investigators prioritized customers
The NCA says investigators triaged customers according to how much they had spent and how many times they had been observed using the service to launch DDoS attacks. The retrospective does not give a specific spending threshold or say that registration alone established that a person had launched an attack.
Arrests, addresses and completed visits
The NCA retrospective records six UK arrests and 28 completed cease-and-desist visits. SecurityWeek’s report, published while the operation was under way in August 2015, separately said officers were visiting roughly 50 addresses linked to people believed to have registered on the site, who were not necessarily believed to have launched attacks. The figures describe different activity at different reporting points: an address linked to a registrant is not the same measure as a completed visit.
SecurityWeek also reported that two other suspects, from Cardiff and Northolt, had been arrested earlier in 2015. That report and the NCA retrospective should be read as accounts with different scopes and timing, not combined into a single final count of addresses or visits.
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SecurityWeek attributed this statement to Tony Adams, then Head of Investigations at the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit: “By paying a comparatively small fee, tools like Lizard Stresser can cripple businesses financially and deprive people of access to important information and public services.” The NCA retrospective cited here does not independently reproduce the quotation.
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